JSS MAHAVIDYAPEETHA

JSS SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY (Formerly Sri

Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering)

JSS TECHNICAL INSTITUTIONS CAMPUS

MYSURU – 570 006

Subject: Signals and Systems (EC 430) Event- 4

Topic: Optical Character Recognition using MATLAB

Submitted by:

SL NAME USN NUMBER ROLL NO.

NO.
1 KANDIBEDALA ABHISHEK KUMAR 01JST17EC040 20

2 MANOJ KUMAR 01JST17EC053 28

3 MANTENA VINAY KRISHNA 01JST17EC055 29
4 UMAIR HUSSAIN 01JST16EC105 2

Submitted to:
Anitha S Prasad
Assistant Professor
Department of Electronics & Communication
JSS Science and Technology University
Mysuru

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 INDEX

SL NO CONTENTS PAGE NO

1 ABSTRACT 3

2 INTRODUCTION 3

3 PROBLEM STATEMENT 4

4 SOFTWARE USED 4

5 WORKING 5

6 RESULTS 7

7 APPLICATIONS 9

8 CONCLUSION 10

9 REFERENCES 10

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ABSTRACT

Optical character recognition (OCR) is process of classification of optical patterns contained in a digital
image. The character recognition is achieved through segmentation, feature extraction and classification.
This chapter presents the basic ideas of OCR needed for a better understanding of the book. The chapter
starts with a brief background and history of OCR systems. Then the different techniques of OCR systems
such as optical scanning, location segmentation, pre-processing, segmentation, representation, feature
extraction, training and recognition and post-processing.

INTRODUCTION
People have always tried to develop machines which could do the work of a
h u m a n being. The reason is obvious since for most of history, man has been very successful in using the
machines developed to reduce the amount of physical labor needed to do many tasks. With the
advent of the computer, it became a possibility that machines could also reduce the amount
of mental labor needed for many tasks. Over the past fifty or so years, with the development
of computers ranging from ones capable of becoming the world chess champion to ones capable
of understanding speech, it has come to seem as though there is no human mental faculty which
is beyond the ability of machines. Today, many researchers have developed algorithms torecognize
printed as well as handwritten characters. But the problem of interchanging
d a t a between human beings and computing machines is a challenging one. In reality, it is verydifficult to
achieve 100% accuracy.

Even humans too will make mistakes when come to pattern recognition. The accurate recognition of
typewritten text is now considered largely a solved problem in applications where clear imaging is available
such as scanning of printed documents. Typical a c c u r a c y r a t e s o n t h e s e e x c e e d 9 9 % ; t o t a l
a c c u r a c y c a n o n l y b e a c h i e v e d b y h u m a n r e v i e w . Other areas including recognition of hand
printing, cursive handwriting, and printed text in other scripts especially those with a very large
number of characters are still the subject of active research.

T h i s p r o j e c t t i t l e d ‘ C h a r a c t e r R e c o g n i t i o n S ys t e m ’ i s a n o f f l i n e r e c o g n i t i o n s ys t e m
developed to identify either printed characters or discrete run-on handwritten characters. It is
a part of pattern recognition that usually deals with the realization of the written scripts or printed material

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into digital form. The main advantage of storing these written texts in digital form ist h a t , i t
requires less space for storage and can be maintained for further references without
referring to the actual script again and again

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Your boss gives you a hardcopy of a company document that needs updating. Your client hands you a
printed magazine article and asks you to create an editable text version. You receive an electronic image of a
brochure and need to update the text.

What do all these situations have in common? They could all involve you spending hours retyping manually
and correcting typos. Or you could take a more modern approach and convert any and all of them into a
digital format with fully editable text in a matter of minutes.

All you need is a scanner or digital camera (to create an image file of any printed document) or an electronic
image (if you’ve already got a .PDF, .jpg, .eps, .png or similar file, you’re in business), and Optical
Character Recognition (OCR) software, like the OCR software

SOFTWARE USED
MATLAB

MATLAB (matrix laboratory) is a multi-paradigm numerical computing environment and proprietary

programming language developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of
functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with
programs written in other languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, Fortran and Python.

Although MATLAB is intended primarily for numerical computing, an optional toolbox uses the
MiPads symbolic engine, allowing access to symbolic computing abilities. An additional package,
Simulink, adds graphical multi-domain simulation and model-based design for dynamic and embedded
systems.

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WORK FLOW PROCESS

Typical OCR system consists of several components. In figure 1. a common setup is illustrated. The first
step in the process is to digitize the analog document using an optical scanner. When the regions
containing text are located, each symbol is extracted through a segmentation process. The extracted
symbols may then be preprocessed, eliminating noise, to facilitate the extraction of features in the next
step. The identity of each symbol is found by comparing the extracted features with descriptions of the
symbol classes obtained through a previous learning phase. Finally contextual information is used to
reconstruct the words and numbers of the original text.

Fig.1. Components of an OCR System

A. Optical scanning
Through the scanning process a digital image of the original document is captured. In OCR optical
scanners are used, which generally consist of a transport mechanism plus a sensing device that converts
light intensity into gray-levels. Printed documents usually consist of black print on a white background.
Hence, when performing OCR, it is common practice to convert the multilevel image into a bilevel image
of black and white. Often this process, known as thresholding, is performed on the scanner to save memory
space and computational effort. The thresholding process is important as the results of the following
recognition is totally dependent of the quality of the bilevel image. Still, the thresholding performed on the
scanner is usually very simple. A fixed threshold is used, where gray-levels below this threshold is said to
be black and levels above are said to be white. For a high-contrast document with uniform background, a
prechosen fixed threshold can be sufficient. However, a lot of documents encountered in practice have a
rather large range in contrast

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B. Location and segmentation
Segmentation is the isolation of characters or words. The majority of optical character recognition
algorithms segment the words into isolated characters which are recognized individually. Usually this
segmentation is performed by isolating each connected component, that is each connected black area. This
technique is easy to implement, but problems occur if characters touch or if characters are fragmented and
consist of several parts. The main problems in segmentation may be divided into four groups:
Extraction of touching and fragmented characters. Distinguishing noise from text.

Mistaking graphics or geometry for text.

Mistaking text for graphics or geometry.

C. Preprocessing
The image resulting from the scanning process may contain a certain amount of noise. The smoothing
implies both filling and thinning. Filling eliminates small breaks, gaps and holes in the digitized characters,
while thinning reduces the width of the line. The most common techniques for smoothing, moves a
window across the binary image of the character, applying certain rules to the contents of the window. The
normalization is applied to obtain characters of uniform size, slant and rotation. To be able to correct for
rotation, the angle of rotation must be found. For rotated pages and lines of text, variants of Hough
transform are commonly used for detecting skew.

D. Feature Extraction
The techniques for extraction of such features are often divided into three main groups, where the features
are found from:
• The distribution of points.
• Transformations and series expansions.
• Structural analysis.
In MATLAB mat2cell command is used for the extraction of image in form of a cell for correlating with
the saved templates.Fig.2 shows extraction of character in Matrix form.

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E. Template-matching and correlation techniques
These techniques are different from the others in that no features are actually extracted. Instead the matrix
containing the image of the input character is directly matched with a set of prototype characters
representing each possible class. The distance between the pattern and each prototype is computed, and the
class of the prototype giving the best match is assigned to the pattern. The technique is simple and easy to
implement in hardware and has been used in many commercial OCR machines. However, this technique is
sensitive to noise and style variations and has no way of handling rotated characters.

F. Post Processing
It encompasses grouping, error detection and correction techniques. The result of plain symbol recognition
on a document, is a set of individual symbols. However, these symbols in themselves do usually not
contain enough information. Instead we would like to associate the individual symbols that belong to the
same string with each other, making up words and numbers. The process of performing this association of
symbols into strings, is commonly referred to as grouping. The grouping of the symbols into strings is
based on the symbols location in the document. Symbols that are found to be sufficiently close are grouped
together Up until the grouping each character has been treated separately, and the context in which each
character appears has usually not been exploited. However, in advanced optical text recognition problems,
a system consisting only of single-character recognition will not be sufficient. Even the best recognition
systems will not give 100% percent correct identification of all characters, but some of these errors may be
detected or even corrected by the use of context.

IMPLIMENTATION
The character recognition is now used to compare the each individual character with the character stored in
the database. OCR uses the correlation method to match the characters. And if both the character matches
then it displays the authorized otherwise it will display the unauthorized.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

This section presents the simulation results of the developed OCR system. Different images of text having
are taken and stored in PC. The screenshot of the simulation and are displays below. Two original
images of text are shown.

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ANPR USING MATLAB

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APPLICATIONS:
Some of the fields where character recognition can be applied are,
•Text to speech converters:By converting handwritten and printed text to editable text format, that can
be convertedto speech by various available text-to-voice converters that will help the visuallyimpaired
persons.
•Postal services:To sort out the posts according their destination by reading their address present on their
envelope this makes sorting faster and accurate.
•Security applicationsIn banking services for reading the amount, name of the person present on cheque,
DDetc.
•Restoration of old ScriptsOld scripts can be stored digitally so that they can be reproduced whenever
needed.
•The same principle can be used for Number Plate recognition and in the Name Cardreader.

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CONCLUSION:
Character Recognition” using correlation technique is easy to implement. Since this algorithm is based on
simple correlation with the database, the time of evaluation is very less. Also the database which was
partitioned based on the areas of the characters made it more efficient. Thus, this algorithm provides an
overall performance in both speed and accuracy. “Character Recognition” using correlation, works
effectively for certain fonts of English printed characters. This has applications such as in license plate
recognition system, text to speech converters, postal departments etc. It also works for discrete
handwritten run-on characters which has wide applications such as in postal services, in offices such as
bank, sales-tax, railway, embassy, etc. Since “Character Recognition” deals with offline process, it
requires some time to compute the results and hence it is not real time. Also if the handwritten characters
are connected then some errors will be introduced during the recognition process.

REFERENCES
1.Digital Image Processing An Algorithmic Approach with MATLAB By Uvais Qidwai, C.H. Chen
2.Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB 2nd Edition by Rafael c. gonzalez
3. International Journal of Computational Intelligence Research ISSN 0973-1873 Volume 13, Number 9
(2017), pp. 2283-2288
4.Rayarathna, Bandara, “A Junction Based Segmentation Algorithm for Offline Hand written Connected
Character Segmentation”, IEEE Nov. 28 2006-Dec. 1 2006, 147 – 147.
5.Dr.-Ing. Igor Tchouchenkov, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Heinz Wörn, “Optical Character Recognition Using
Optimisation Algorithms”, Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Computer Science and
Information Technologies CSIT’2007, Ufa, Russia, 2007

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