【精选】一个强健的,语言独立的OCR系统.pdfVIP

Header for SPIE use A Robust, Language-Independent OCR System Zhidong Lu, Issam Bazzi, Andras Kornai, John Makhoul, Premkumar Natarajan, and Richard Schwartz BBN Technologies, GTE Internetworking, Cambridge, MA 02138 ABSTRACT We present a language-independent optical character recognition (OCR) system that is capable, in principle, of recognizing printed text from most of the world’s languages. For each new language or script the system requires sample training data along with ground truth at the text-line level; there is no need to specify the location of either the lines or the words and characters. The system uses hidden Markov modeling (HMM) technology to model each character. In addition to language independence, the technology enhances performance for degraded data, such as fax, by using unsupervised adaptation techniques. Thus far, we have demonstrated the language-independence of this approach for Arabic, English, and Chinese. Recognition results are presented in this paper, including results on faxed data. Keywords: character recognition, OCR, speech recognition, Hidden Markov Models, Arabic OCR, Chinese OCR 1. INTRODUCTION The use of Hidden Markov Models (HMM) in developing continuous speech recognition (CSR) technology has several useful aspects, including language-independent training and recognition methodology; automatic training on non-segmented data; and simultaneous segmentation and recognition. We have developed a language-independent OCR system that uses existing continuous speech recognition technology [4,16,22]. Except for the preprocessing and feature-extractio