FyFont: Find-your-font in large font databases

Abstract

A search engine for font recognition in very large font databases is presented and evaluated. The search engine analyzes an image of a text line, and responds with the name of the font used when writing the text. After segmenting the input image into single characters, the recognition is mainly based on eigenimages calculated from edge filtered character images. We evaluate the system with printed and scanned text lines and character images. The database used contains 2763 different fonts from the English alphabet. Our evaluation shows that for 99.8 % of the queries, the correct font name is one of the five best matches. Apart from finding fonts in large databases, the search engine can also be used as a pre-processor for Optical Character Recognition. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.