Recognition of English business cards using enhanced hybrid network

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed a novel method for the recognition of English business cards by using the projection method and the enhanced hybrid network. The recognition of business cards consists of the extraction phase of character areas and the recognition phase of extracted characters. In the extraction phase, first of all, noises are removed from the images of business cards, and the feature areas including character strings are separated from the business card images by using the horizontal smearing method and the 8-directional contour tracking method. And using the image projection method, the feature areas are split into the areas of individual characters. We also proposed the enhanced hybrid network that organizes the middle layer effectively by using the enhanced ART1 neural network adjusting the vigilance threshold dynamically according to the homogeneity between patterns. In the recognition phase, the proposed neural network is applied to recognize individual characters. Our experiment result showed that the proposed recognition algorithm has higher success rate of recognition and faster learning time than the conventional neural network based recognition. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.