INTRODUCTION

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1.INTRODUCTION

Optical character recognition is an application of pattern recognition which automatically

detects and recognizes the optical characters without human intervention. Optical character
recognition is an application of pattern recognition which automatically detects and recognizes
the optical characters without human intervention. OCR has its applications in a number of
fields such as postal code identification, automated guided vehicles, digital libraries, object
identification, processing of different receipts and personal digital assistants. The proposed
method is the recognition of optical characters on its geometric feature points. All the characters
are basically made up of tree geometric entities. That is, corners, endings and bifurcations
which is used in identifying the different characters.

The proposed system is divided into two stages, i.e. preprocessing and feature extraction.
The preprocessing stage removes the noise and converts the width of character to single pixel.
Second stage is feature extraction which applies a modified crossing number method to extract
geometric features from the thinned character. Each character can be differentiated based on
number of corners, endings and bifurcations it has. In classification, the systems use a simple
rule based method to identify the input character.

Detection of corners in a character also helps in the exact detection of the character. Endings are
the end points of lines in a character and they may be detected using simple geometric
approaches. One way of ending detection may be to use a simple mask and do the calculations
on the basis of this mask. Bifurcations are the pixels, beyond which a single line is divided into
two or more. For the problem of optical character recognition, the project only consider the
bifurcation points which give rise to two other lines. Reason being that all the characters include
bifurcations in which only two lines originate.

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1.1 STATEMENT ABOUT THE PROBLEM

The existing system is capable of detecting only the alphabets present in the scanned
image. Also the accuracy level is not high. The digits and special symbols are not recognized by
the existing method. Thus for this to be possible a new method is proposed and the system is
implemented.

1.2OBJECTIVE AND SCOPE OF THE PROJECT

To develop an application this is capable of detecting all the optical characters present in
a scanned image. The characters detected include alphabets, special symbols and numeric’s.

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SYSTEM ANALYSIS