Advances in the BBN BYBLOS OCR system

Author

Lu, Zhidong ; Schwartz, Richard ; Natarajan, Premkumar ; Bazzi, Issam ; Makhoul, John

Author_Institution

GTE Corp., Cambridge, MA, USA

fYear

1999

fDate

20-22 Sep 1999

Firstpage

337

Lastpage

340

Abstract

We present some recent advances in the BBN BYBLOS OCR system. This OCR system can be used to recognize Arabic, Chinese, and English with high accuracy. A major change in the system is the use of continuous-density HMMs, which allow us to take advantage of a large amount of training data and to use unsupervised adaptation methods to improve accuracy in many cases, e.g., on degraded data. Another advance is the substantial increase in recognition speed. With this increased speed, the system is fast enough for practical use on Arabic and English data. The extension of the system to Chinese further demonstrated the language independence of this system and showed that this system can be used on languages with large character sets and complicated character structures. The Chinese OCR system yielded high accuracy on newspaper data

Keywords

character sets; document image processing; hidden Markov models; optical character recognition; Arabic; BBN BYBLOS; Chinese; English; OCR; character sets; continuous-density hidden Markov model; newspaper data; optical character recognition; unsupervised adaptation methods; Character recognition; Degradation; Feature extraction; Hidden Markov models; Linear discriminant analysis; Optical character recognition software; Robustness; Speech recognition; Training data; Writing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Document Analysis and Recognition, 1999. ICDAR '99. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on

Conference_Location

Bangalore

Print_ISBN

0-7695-0318-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICDAR.1999.791793

Filename

791793