A system for trademark pattern registration and recognition

With the increasing number of trademarks created, it becomes a difficult task for the law ministry in any country to keep track of the trademarks used and ensure the uniqueness of each trademark before registering them. There is thus a need to have a systematic way of searching through the trademark records for uniqueness and simplifying the task of trademark registration. There are many ways in which the search for similar trademarks can be implemented. The use of reference colour table, interactive segmentation and colour distance are some of the methods that have been tested. A system that considers the composite effects of all features of a trademark, instead of depending on information provided by one particular feature, is presented in this paper. This system uses all the features of a trademark, such as colour, number of elements, and number of colour "lakes", to form a kind of point system. Points are given for similarities between the trademark-under-test and those in the database. Trademarks in the database with the least points will be considered as closely matching the trademark-under-test and will be displayed on screen for final consideration.