1987 Reports

A Syntactic Omni-Font Character Recognition System

Wolberg, George

The author introduces a syntactic omni-font character recognition system that recognizes a wide range of fonts, including handprinted characters. A structural pattern-matching approach is used. Essentially, a set of loosely constrained rules specify pattern components and their interrelationships. The robustness of the system is derived from the orthogonal set of pattern descriptors, location functions, and the manner in which they are combined to exploit the topological structure of characters. By virtue of the new pattern description language, PDL, the user may easily write rules to define new patterns for the system to recognize. The system also features scale-invariance and user-definable sensitivity to tilt orientation. The system has achieved a 95. 2% recognition rate.