OCR Accuracy Improvement through a PDE-Based Approach

This paper focuses on improving the optical character recognition (OCR) system ´s accuracy by restoring damaged character through a PDE (Partial Differential Equation)-based approach. This approach, proposed by D. Tschumperle, is an anisotropic diffusion approach driven by local tensors fields. Actually, such approach has many useful properties that are relevant for use in character restoration. For instance, this approach is very appropriate for the processing of oriented patterns which are major characteristics of textual documents. It incorporates both edge enhancing diffusion that tends to preserve local structures during smoothing and coherence-enhancing diffusion that processes oriented structures by smoothing along the flow direction. Furthermore, this tensor diffusion-based approach compared to the existing sate of the art requires neither segmentation nor training steps. Some experiments, done on degraded document images, illustrate the performance of this PDE-based approach in improving both of the visual quality and the OCR accuracy rates for degraded document images.