Automatic processing of patient's ID on a x-ray film with recognition technique for characters

By using a film digitizer it is possible to digitize X-ray film images with high quality. But from a practical point of view, conventional film digitizer systems are not satisfactory, because the identification of each film, that is indispensable for an image filing system, should be manually recorded. This procedure takes a long time and is cumbersome. In this paper we propose an automatic recognition method of film IDs using Synthetic Discriminant Function filters with an error check code, which greatly improves the recognition ratio. From experimental results it is confirmed that the proposed method is practically feasible. A full automatic film digitizer system is also described.