An efficient method for stamps recognition using Haar wavelet sub-bands

Abstract

The problem facing certain organizations such as insurance companies and government institutions where a huge amount of documents is handled every day, hence an automated stamp recognition system is required. The image of the stamp may be on a different background, with different sizes, and suffers from rotating in different directions, also, the appearance of soft areas (patches) or small points as noise. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to extract and recognize the color stamp image. This paper proposed a method to recognize stamps, by using a technique named Haar wavelet sub-bands. The devised method has four stages: 1) extracts the stamp image; 2) preprocessing the image; 3) feature extraction; and 4) matching. This paper is implemented using C sharp (Microsoft Visual Studio 2012) programming language. The experiments conducted on a stamp dataset showed that the proposed method has a great capability to recognize stamps when using Haar wavelet transform with two sets of features (i.e., 100% recognition rate for energy features and 99.93% recognition rate for low order moment).