Extraction of words from the national ID cards for automated recognition
Md. Rezwan Akhter, Md. Hasanuzzaman Bhuiyan, Mohammad Shorif Uddin · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2011
The government of Bangladesh introduced national ID cards in 2008 for all peoples of age 18 years and above. This card is now a de-facto identity document and finds diverse applications in vote casting, bank account opening, telephone subscribing as well as in many real life transactions and security checking. To get real fruits of this versatile ID card, automated retrieving and recognition of an independent person from this extra large national database is an ultimate necessity. This work is the first step to fill this gap in making the recognition in automated fashion. Here we have investigated an image analysis technique to extract the words that will be used in subsequent recognition steps. At first scanned ID card image is used as an input into the computer system and then the target text region is separated from the picture region. The text region is used for separation of lines and words on the basis of the vertical and horizontal projections of image intensity, respectively. Experimentation using real national ID cards confirms the effectiveness of our technique.