A methodology for special symbol recognitions

Presents a special symbol recognition system that incorporates the result of OCR to recognize the special symbols those nor handled by the current commercial OCR systems. Given a document image and the OCR output, we first refine the character coordinates produced by the OCR. Then, the special symbols are distinguished from the normal characters. Finally, we compute the features from the special symbol sub-images and a supervised classifier is used to assign the sub-images to one of the predefined special symbol categories. The system was tested on 5516 images from the National Library of Medicine. The evaluation results are reported in the paper