Decorated Character Recognition Employing Modified SOM Matching

Character recognition is a classical issue which has been devoted by a lot of researchers.Making character recognition system more widely available in natural scene images might open upinteresting possibility to use as an input interface of characters and an annotation method for images.Nevertheless, it is still difficult to recognize all sorts of fonts including decorated characters such ascharacters depicted on signboards. The decorated characters are constructed by using some specialtechniques for attracting viewers' attentions. Therefore, it is hard to obtain good recognition results bythe existingOCRs. In this paper,we propose a newcharacter recognition systemusing SOM. The SOMis employed to extract an essential structure concerning the topology from a character. The extractedtopological structure from each character is used to matching and the recognition is performed on thebasis of the topological matching. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed methodin most forms of characters.