noisy data forced to 1

back-propagation m

Optical character rec

converting a printed factors involved in
CII characters that optimal selection of

systems, banking, automat

devices for blind.

developed based
them have been found c o m e

0-7803-3280-6/96/$5.00 '1996 IEEE 44 -

smooth the digitised characters. Moreover, the system
must be able to handle touching characters,
proportional spacing, variable line spacing and
change of font style in the scanned text, in addition to
the problems of multi-fonts.
[ image acquisition ]
~~
vector of the neural network. Finally, an input vector
that contains 64 (horizontal + vertical) unique
features of the character is evaluated. A histogram is
the distribution of the pixel intensity values of an
image or portion of an image. It indicates the overall
brightness and contrass of an image. Histogram

techniques are used for automatic processing of lines,

words and characters extraction in the sequence.
I The erosion and dilation operations make the object
mage pre-processing
smaller and larger respectively. Erosion makes an
I object smaller by removing or eroding away the pixel
on its edges. Dilation makes an object larger by
adding pixel around its edges. Dilation technique is
used for extracting a word from the original image
(gray scale). Image dilation is applied to make the
characters in a word thicker until they join together.
The image erosion techniques are used for extracting
input features
& targets each chwacter from a word.

I I

[ ~~traning ll results 1 2.2. Neural Network Architecture

The architecture of a neural network determines how

a neural network transforms its input into an output.
Figure 1 System Block Diagram This transformation can be viewed as a computation.
We have implemented a multi-layer feed forward
2.1. Feature Extraction neural network with one hidden layer as shown in
figure 3.
Feature extraction is the process of getting
hidden
information about an object or a group of object in
n layer
order to facilitate classification. This is an important
part in our system. The character from the scanned
image is normalised from 60 X 60 pixel into 32 X 32
pixel as in figure 2.

60
m

U
321
. *.
0 weight

' -.-.[El Figure 2

32 - connection
Figure 3 The Network Model

The topology of the network is 64 input modes, 64

hidden nodes and 62 output nodes (64-64-62). Since
The horizontal and vertical vectors (Vh and Vv the image character is normalised to have a input
respectively) are added together to form the input

- 2245 -
input units. As a rule
hidden layer nodes shoul

Total number of tr .9>,

using the back-propa (a..z) and b].
description of back- , Total number of te
Note:P=>F means

Batch
The system was initi error
characters ( [A..Z, a..z, ) of Times Roman font
14. Each character was captured once and its
are stored in an array. These
back-propagation neural netw
performed. After the training, 0.08526
with training set and testing set characters. The table
below shows the results of the system.
Experiment 1:
Training font : Times New Rom
Testing font : Times New Rom 0.03282
Network configuration: 6
Total number of training
and (a..z)
Total number of testing c
Note:P=>F means P is miss-classify as F

Batch training
mor time
(hours)

3.88961 13

0.04008 14

h=>O
u=>n
0.01281 14
U=>H
[3]. Hussain, B and Kabuka, M. R., “A novel feature [5]. Rumelhart, D. E, Hinton, G.E., Williams, R. J,
recognition neural network and its application to “Learning Representation by Error
character recognition”, IEEE Transactions of Pattem Backpropagation”, In Parallel Distributed
Recognition and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 16, Processing, Vol. 1, MIT Press, Cambridge,
-
No.1, 1994, pp.98 106. Chapter.8, 1986, pp.3 18-362.

[4]. Avi-Itzhak, H. I, Diep, T. A. and Garland, H,
“High accuracy optical character recognition using
neural networks with centroid dithering”, IEEE
Transactions of Pattem Recognition and Machine
Intelligence, Vol. 17, No.2, 1995, pp.218-224.
[6]. Jones, W. P., and Hoskins, J., “Back
Propagation: A generalised learning rule”, Byte, 12,
1987, pp. 155-158.

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