Edit Distance of Regular Languages

The edit distance of a pair of strings, and of a string and a language are well known concepts that have various applications in optical character recognition (OCR) and document image analysis (DIA). In the present paper, a generalization is proposed, viz., the edit distance of two regular languages. A method for the computation of the edit distance of two regular languages is introduced and its correctness is shown. Also, applications in the areas of OCR and DIA are discussed.

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