Recognition of Passports Using FCM-Based RBF Network

This paper proposes a novel method for the recognition of passports based on a FCM-based RBF network. First, for the extraction of individual codes for recognizing, this paper targets code sequence blocks including individual codes by applying Sobel masking, horizontal smearing and a contour tracking algorithm on the passport image. As the last step, individual codes are recovered and extracted from the binarized areas by applying CDM masking and vertical smearing. This paper also proposes a FCM-based RBF network that adapts the FCM algorithm for the middle layer. This network is applied to the recognition of individual codes. The results of the experiments for performance evaluation on the real passport images showed that the proposed method has the better performance compared with other approaches.