Kanji Character Recognition Unit With Hand-Scanner Using SIMD Processor
Toshio Kondo, Shunkichi Tada, Sueharu Miyahara · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1988
A prototype OCR is constructed using a very compact parallel processing unit. This unit, designed for interactive character recognition applications, is equipped with a hand-scanner for input and a personal computer for word and/or image processing. The heart of this unit is a bit-serial Single Instruction Multiple Data stream (SIMD) array processor constructed with four identical cellular array LSIs (AAP2). The processor is fully programmable and the complex pro-cess of Japanese character recognition can be carried out with a single program package. Its architecture permits flexible and high-speed SIMD operations to process bitline data such as local fields of scanned documents. The processor components were integrated into one board and confirmed to be more than ten times faster than present image processors of the same size through various image processing tests. High character recognition performance is obtained at a reading speed of 8 Japanese characters per second which is sufficient for hand-scanning data input operations. The recognition rate is higher than 98% for about 3,300 Japanese characters.