OCR Tool Overview

The OCR tool comprises the following components:

OCR Segmenter tool, performing the following:
1. Image preprocessing and rectification
2. Image binarization
3. Character segmentation
OCR Classifier tool, performing classification of segmented rectified images.
OCR Dictionary Fielding tool, performing string verification and correction.

Note: To perform optical character recognition, using the OCR Segmenter tool and the OCR Classifier tool are required steps, whereas using the OCR Dictionary Fielding tool is an optional step.

The following figure illustrates the OCR process.

OCR process

The OCR Segmenter tool takes an input image and the region of interest (ROI) that contains the string to be read in the input image and outputs segmented rectified images of the characters in the string, which become classified by the OCR Classifier tool. The output from the OCR Classifier tool is passed to the OCR Dictionary Fielding tool, which determines the position of the fielding vis-a-vis the read string. Lastly, the characters are reclassified based on the fielding information for each character position.