Character Recognition

Using Cross Correlation

Prepared by: Vinay Varghese
Introduction:
The purpose of this presentation is to briefly explain how
character recognition works

Explanations were prepared with the target audience in mind
(Grade 12 students)

Hence, the explanations will not dwell too much on the in
depth details of character recognition
Definition:


Character recognition is the process by which a software can read text
from an image file

In the field of Electrical Engineering, character recognition falls under the
category of image processing
Brief Example:
Below is an example of what should happen if one inputs an image with
text into a character recognition program:

Input: Output:
Application:
There are many modern day applications for text recognition

As we head into the future, the text recognition will be more and more
useful

For example: As the technology gets better, one could take his or her
handwritten notes from a lecture and have in converted into a word text
document with a simple scan

This technology also has other applications like automatically detecting a
cars licence plate from a photo taken from a speeding fine.
How it works
There are many ways in which text recognition can be implemented

This presentation will only deal with the method known as cross
correlation

To put it brief, cross correlation is the process by which two signals are
compared to see the amount by which the two signals are similar

In text recognition, this can be used in the following manner: For example,
one can try compare the letter A from the computer data base with any
letter inside the input image. If there is match between a letter in the
image and that of the letter A, then that means the letter A exists in the
image
Graphic Example:
I will now proceed to show how one can convert a specific persons hand
writing into text

There are many limitations to this simple process. For example, it will only
work for people with the same handwriting. The way I write the number 7
may differ from the way someone else writes the same number

In other words, there will be minimum cross correlation between people
of different handwriting styles
Example: My handwriting
In order to start detecting my handwriting. There needs to be a data base
(template) with every letter from a-z with my handwriting style within the
detection program.
Below is the data base of my own handwriting that I have briefly created.
Each character in a box represents a letter


Defining each character:
The letter styles from the previous slide still need to be linked to digital
characters so that the program knows exactly what each letter means.
This is done in a manner similar to the image below:








This is not only done for the above four letters for letter but for each letter
from a to z.
Detection:
Each template letter will now dragged across the image file to look for
similarities using cross correlation.
Should there be a correlation, then the program will link the handwritten
letter to a digital letter and make it text



Result:
After the letters were compared, the result will look as follows:


How the program sees the cross correlation:
This section is a bit complicated, but I want to show what the computer
sees after a comparison between two letters is done:


Explanation of the correlation graph:
Explanation of the correlation graph:
The peak in the graph conveys important information. The position of the
peak shows the position of the letter in question. The height of the peak
also shows how similar the two letters are

To have increased accuracy, one can change the accepted value of the
peak value (threshold)

E.g Accepting a peak of 90 will be more accurate than a peak of 80
Conclusion
The previous slides were just a brief explanation as to how one can
implement an easy character recognition algorithm

This is the method of detecting text using cross correlation

There are many other methods that are arguably better

Hope you enjoyed the presentation!