Convex hull based approach for multi-oriented character recognition from graphical documents

Abstract

In this paper, we present a scheme towards recognition of English character in multi-scale and multi-oriented environments. Graphical document such as map consists of text lines which appear in different orientation. Sometimes, characters in a single word may follow a curvi-linear way to annotate the graphical curve lines. For recognition of such multi-scale and multi-oriented characters a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based scheme is presented in this paper. The feature used here is invariant to character orientation. Circular ring and convex hull have been used along with angular information of the contour pixels of the character to make the feature rotation invariant. We tested our proposed scheme on two different datasets. Combining circular and convex hull feature we have obtained 96.73% and 99.56% accuracy in these two datasets. © 2008 IEEE.