Character Shape Distortion Correction of Camera Acquired Document Images
Jang Dae-Geun, Eui-Jeong Kim · The Journal of the Korean Institute of Information and Communication Engineering · 2006
Document images captured by scanners have only skewing distortion. But camera captured document images have not only skew but also vignetting effect and geometric distortion. Vignetting effect, which makes the border areas to be darker than the center of the image, make it difficult to separate characters from the document images. But this effect has being decreased, as the lens manufacturing skill is developed. Geometric distortion, occurred by the mismatch of angle and center position between the document image and the camera, make the shape of characters to be distorted, so that the character recognition is more difficult than the case of using scanner. In this paper, we propose a method that can increase the performance of character recognition by correcting the geometric distortion of document images using a linear approximation which changes the quadrilateral region to the rectangle one. The proposed method also determine the quadrilateral transform region automatically, using the alignment of character lines and the skewed angles of characters located in the edges of each character line. Proposed method, therefore, can correct the geometric distortion without getting positional information from camera.