Recognizing Call Numbers for Library Books: The Problem and Issues
Hanh H. Pham, Andre Dvorak, Miguel Perez · 2018
This paper addresses a challenging and practical problem in image processing and pattern recognition where we need to recognize book call numbers, or book IDs using the Library of Congress format, in images of book spines. For this special case of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) we review and evaluate a number of standard and specialized OCR systems. Our experiment results and analysis show that the available OCR systems are not effective enough for recognizing book call numbers on the book spines as library labels are very small and may be worn out while the symbols printed on them are very thin. Since the recognition success rates of current OCR systems are not acceptable to be used in any meaningful application, a better solution is necessary.