Separation of touching characters in optical character recognition

Abstract From the Canadian patent

Method and apparatus for separating touching characters within an optical character recognition (OCR) computer (1). An input document (20) is scanned by scanner (2) forming a set of scan lines (3). A segmentation process (4) is performed on the scan lines (3) to create a set of segmented image boxes (5). Candidate characters within the image boxes (5) are classified by a classification module (6) based upon a library of stored models (7). When the candidate characters have high degree of confidence they are classified and coded into a binary form (8) such as ASCII. Those candidate characters that are not classified are processed by a touching character decision module (9) to determine …