English Characters OCR Pertinent for Mobile Devices

Abstract

Optical character recognition concerns translating character images into character text. Four main stages constitute any optical recognition system. They are pre-processing, feature extraction, character recognition, and post-processing. The two most important stages are the feature extraction method and the character recognition algorithm. The optical character recognition system for mobile application must fulfill two requirements, small system size and high speed. In this research, a lightweight footprint feature dataset was created based on the center and centroid of the character image together with other simple image statistics. Fast character recognition algorithm based on weighted Euclidean distance was adapted. A mobile phone application prototype was developed. An accuracy of over 99% was achieved. The execution time for recognizing one character was in millisecond scale when a mobile phone model was used.