Unified approach toward text recognition
Tao Hong, Jonathan J. Hull, Sargur N. Srihari · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
In our recent research, we found that visual inter-word relations can be useful for different stages of English text recognition such as character segmentation and postprocessing. Different methods had been designed for different stages. In this paper, we propose a unified approach to use visual contextual information for text recognition. Each word image has a lattice, which is a data structure to keep results of segmentation, recognition and visual inter-word relation analysis. A lattice allows ambiguity and uncertainty at different levels. A lattice-based unification algorithm is proposed to analyze information in the lattices of two or more visually related word images, and upgrade their contents. Under the approach, different stages of text recognition can be accomplished by the same set of operations -- inter-word relation analysis and lattice-based unification. The segmentation and recognition result of a word image can be propagated to those visually related word images and can contribute to the recognition of them. In this paper, the formal definition of lattice, the unification operators and their uses are discussed in detail.