Character Recognition of Thick Books Using a Stereo Vision System

In this paper, we propose a character recognition method for thick books with curved surfaces using a stereo vision system. Characters in images of thick book's pages acquired with an image scanner are difficult to recognize because they are deformed under the influence of curved surface. In our method, the 3D shape reconstruction of the book's surface is executed from the result of the stereoscopic measurement by putting the book upward, and a flat surface is recovered from the curved surface to improve the character recognition rate. The validity of the proposed method is shown through experiments.