An Algorithmic Approach for Text Recognition from
Printed/Typed Text Images
Neha Agrawal (Author)
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Amity School of Engineering and Technology
Amity University Uttar Pradesh
Noida, India
nehaagrwl@hotmail.com
Abstract— Extraction of texts from scanned copies
of documents and text images is an important task in
the recent scenario. Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) is used to analyze text in images. The proposed
algorithm deals with taking scanned copy of a
document as an input and extract texts from the image
into a text format using Otsu’s algorithm for
segmentation and Hough transform method for skew
detection. The system was confined to recognize
English alphabets (A-Z, a-z) and numerals (0-9). OCR
technique has been implemented to recognize
characters. Validation tests were done on screenshots of
typed texts and images of scanned document from
Internet sources. Experimental results indicate that the
proposed algorithm is able to recognize alphabets
written in Verdana font style with size 14 and also
showed good results with rotated images. The average
accuracy to determine rotation angle correctly was
calculated to be 90% and overall system accuracy was
calculated to be 93%.
Keywords—OCR; Otsu’s algorithm; Hough transform;
English alphabets; skew detection
I. INTRODUCTION
People deal with chunks of information daily. Much
data nowadays is sent in the form of images or scanned
documents. Many situations require editing of data sent in
the form of images. Thus, we need tools to convert these
documents into editable forms. Hence, recognition of texts
from printed/typed text images is an important task. The
purpose of the paper is to identify methods to convert
printed text images into editable documents. The primary
objective is to extract characters from printed or typed text
images. Nowadays, there are various techniques and
algorithms available to do the same. Optical character
recognition is one of the popular techniques used for
recognizing texts. It is a technique that is used to convert
scanned images of printed or handwritten text into character
streams that can be read by machines and then can be edited
for further functionalities.
After converting a printed or typed text image into a
machine-readable format, it becomes easier to perform
other tasks that are required. One can search for a word or
phrase, edit the content, send it as an email, use it on a web
page, etc.
c
978-1-5386-1719-9/18/$31.00 2018 IEEE
Arashdeep Kaur (Author)
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Amity School of Engineering and Technology
Amity University Uttar Pradesh
Noida, India
akaur@amity.edu
A lot of research has already been done in this area. To
recognize characters, techniques like Otsu’s method has
been used for image segmentation and Hough transform for
skew detection. For detection of characters, pattern
recognition techniques are used.
In 1923, a patent in OCR was granted to Gaurav
Tauschek in Germany. After him, Paul W. Handel received
a US patent in 1933. Later on, Tauschek also obtained a US
patent for his work. The machine deveoped by Tauschek
used a poto detector and templates.The work on first
prmitive OCR was carried out by RCA engineers in 1949.
The purpose was to assist the visually impaired people for
the US Veterans Administration. However, their device did
not only transform printed text to machine language. It also
then spoke the letters. This was not further used for testing
because the costs were very high.[1]
A lot of work has been carried out to discuss about
document image defects models. To surmise a few parts of
known physics of machine printing and imaging of text,
Sarkar et al[2] used a ten-parameter image degradation
model. This model d that document image decoding (DID)
can help one to attain high accuracy with low manual task
and effort. This is guaranteed even when image degradation
is severe. They had performed huge experiments with all
kinds of images, the results came out with 99% accuracy
even on heavily degraded images. This has reduced the
manual effort of DID as it can be used on low-quality
images without and manual segmentation.
In order to improve the accuracy of the proposed
algorithm, document image enhancement is necessary.
Canon et al.[3] produced a system to enhance and restore
images. The system was known as QUARC. The images
used were the documents prepared using typewriter. To
automatically improve quality of the document images for
OCR processing, they used quality measures and image
restoration techniques. Small speckle factor, touching
character factor, white speckle factor, broken character
factor and font size factor were the quality measures used
by them. The system took document image as an input,
characterized it using the quality measures. Then an image
restoration filter was calculated using a pre-trained linear
classifier. It was claimed that this proposed system
improved the character error rate and word error rate
respectively by 38% and 24%.
Later on, Summers et al. employed a similar method in
their software which was called as ImageRefiner[4]. While
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QUARC just addressed Latin scripts, they improved the
system by also considering non-Latin scripts and non-fixed
fonts. The measures of size, height, area, width, and aspect
ratio were added to the existing quality measures of
QUARC. In a similar manner to QUARC, ImageRefiner
also determined an optimal restoration method using
document image quality measures but at the same time they
changed their classifier to employ an error propagation
neural net.
When dealing with text recognition, it is very important
that text lines are identified in a precise and proper manner.
Various methods have been produced for text line finding.
Breuel[5] proposed an algorithm to find accurate page
rotation and then identifies text lines. Branch and bound
approach to optimal line finding was used by him. It is easy
to implement and has only five parameters.
Bai and Huo[6] proposed a method to extract target text
line from an image which is captured by a hand-held pen
scanner. The method proposed by them was tested and
verified by experiments on a testing database that had 117
document images. The results were satisfying.
In this paper, an algorithm to convert scanned text
images into editable format with maximum efficiency is
proposed. The proposed algorithm uses techniques like
Otsu’s method and Hough transform with some
modification to enhance images, perform skew removal
operations on images and extract text lines efficiently to
detect and recognize characters. Despite using simplest
techniques, the proposed algorithm showed good results
against rotation and scaling after some modification. The
proposed algorithm deals with English alphabets (a-z, A-Z)
and numerals (0-9).
The rest of the paper is organized as follows.
II. PROPOSED ALGORITHM
The proposed algorithm involves following steps:
preprocessing of images, segmentation of images into
individual characters, and recognizing characters. Fig. 1
shows the flow diagram for the proposed algorithm.
Fig.1. Flow Diagram of Proposed Algorithm
A. Creation of Database
For testing of the algorithm, a database with templates
of English characters of size 24 X 42 pixels was created.
The database also consisted 100 test images to test the
accuracy of the algorithm.
B. Preprocessing of Images
The scanned image of a document from which text is to
2018 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering (Confluence)
be extracted is the input for the proposed algorithm. In
preprocessing step, image is converted to binary format to
make it easily readable. Most of the document images are
skewed and contain a lot of background noise. Thus, skew
removal and noise reduction are important steps performed
before we perform segmentation of images.
For skew detection, Hough transformation is used.
Hough transformation helps to find lines in every direction.
It helps to identify the presence of line described by
equation (1) using a two-dimensional array. Despite being
computationally expensive, Hough transformation is a
robust method to detect lines from images. Detection of
lines from images help to find the line which is at the
maximum angle and helps to find the angle by which
image has to be rotated.
‫ ݎ‬ൌ ‫ ߠ •‘… ݔ‬൅ ‫ߠ ‹• ݕ‬ (1)
After rotation of images, noise removal is performed.
For this various filters are used; median filter is used to
remove salt and pepper noise. Weiner filter is used to
smoothen image and then morphological operators are
used to identify text portions to be removed. This image is
the subtracted from the original to get an enhanced image.
C. Segementation of Images:
The process of image segmentation to detect characters
follows noise removal. It involves following steps:
i. First of all, first line of text is cropped from the image.
ii. After the line has been cropped, the line is processed and
individual character is cropped from the line.
iii. The second step is repeated until all characters are
cropped out.
iv. The above three steps are repeated until the entire image
has been read till the last line.
Fig. 2 below shows the various steps used in the process of
segmentation of images according to the algorithm
proposed above.
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
Fig.2: (a) Original image, (b) Image after preprocessing, (c)
Cropped lines from image, (d) Cropped characters from each line
D. Extraction and Recognition of Characters
The system is trained with templates of Verdana font
type with size 14. Thus, the characters are recognized
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 based on matching characters with the templates used for Table 1: Rotation accuracy observed against different
training. angles of rotation
In the previous step of segmentation, individual Rotation angle Rotation Accuracy
character is cropped. After the character has been cropped, 180° 88%
the character is resized into the size of the template. After 130° 92%
that, the resized image is compared with the templates 44° 90%
using correlation factor. The template with which the 160° 93%
resized image shares maximum correlation factor is Average Accuracy 90%
identified as the character represented by the image. The
templates used to train the system are shown in Fig. 3 and One of the samples before and after skew detection and
Fig. 4 shows the templates created after training for the removal is shown in figure 5.
purpose of matching characters.
After detection of character, it is written into a text file.

(a) (b)
Fig.5: (a) Original image with skew, (b) Image after skew
Fig. 3: Templates used to train the system detection and removal
The recognition accuracy for different images was
calculated using the formula given by equation (3).
ே௢Ǥ௢௙஼௛௔௥௔௖௧௘௥௦௖௢௥௥௘௖௧௟௬ூௗ௘௡௧௜௙௜௘ௗ
Ψ‫ ݕܿܽݎݑܿܿܣ‬ൌ  ൈ ͳͲͲΨ (3)
்௢௧௔௟ே௢௢௙஼௛௔௥௔௖௧௘௥௦

The average accuracy for text images with text written in

Verdana font of size 14 was found out to be 93%. One of
the samples with same font as the template is shown in
figure 6 along with the extract of text obtained after text
recognition by applying the proposed algorithm.

Fig. 4: (a) Templates used for matching characters, (b)

Characters cropped from image, (c) Characters resized to
match the size of the template
(a) (b)
Fig. 6: (a) Original Image with same font as the template, (b) Text
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS file created with content of the image after complete execution

The proposed algorithm was tested and validated with For other images that used font other than Verdana, the
different images from different sources. The experiments average accuracy was calculated to be 70%. One of the
and validation of the proposed algorithm has been carried samples with text written in font other than Verdana along
out on different images from different sources. For with the extract of text obtained after text recognition by
validation of same font type as the templates, screenshots applying the proposed algorithm is shown in figure 7.
of typed text are used. The accuracy in this case is almost
95-100% for ideal images and 85-100% for non-ideal
images. Thus, average accuracy is found to be 93%.
Testing on other images from Internet sources was also
done but the results were not too satisfying. Template
matching recognizes characters of different font styles with
an average accuracy of 70%. (a) (b)
Fig. 7: (a) Original Image with different font than the template,
ே௢Ǥ௢௙ா௥௥௢௥஻௜௧௦
ܴ‫ ݕܿܽݎݑܿܿܣ݊݋݅ݐܽݐ݋‬ൌ ൈ ͳͲͲΨ (b) Text file created with content of the image after complete
்௢௧௔௟௡௢௢௙஻௜௧௦
(2) execution

The proposed algorithm showed good results against

rotation. Table 1 gives the rotation accuracy calculated IV. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING ALGORITHMS
against images with rotation at different angles using the The Table 2 gives a quick comparison with some
formula given by equation (2). existing papers.

878 2018 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering (Confluence)
 Table 2: Comparison of recognition accuracy between
existing algorithms and the proposed algorithm.
Existing Techniques Accuracy
[7] 90%
[8] 91%
[9] 76%
Proposed Algorithm 93%
It can be observed from the table that the proposed
algorithm showed good results against existing algorithms
for recognizing texts.
V. CONCLUSIONS
The proposed algorithm is successfully able to
recognize characters from text images with an average
accuracy of 93%. It also showed good results against
rotation. The average rotation accuracy to correctly rectify
skew from images was calculated to be 90%. The proposed
algorithm has also shown good results against scaling and
was also able to reduce noise from images to a good extent.
These were the results with the images that contained text
in the same font style as the template. With rest other
images containing text written in some other font than that
of the template, the average recognition accuracy was
calculated to be 70%. The proposed algorithm can be
improved for other font sizes and font styles by training the
system with more font types.
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