A Syntactic Omni-Font Character Recognition System

This paper introduces a syntactic omni-font character recognition system. The "omnifont" attribute reflects the wide range of fonts that fall within the class of characters that can be recognized. This includes hand-printed characters as well. A structural pattern-matching approach is employed. Essentially, a set of loosely constrained rules specify pattern components and their interrelationships. The robustness of the system is derived from the orthogonal set of pattern descriptors, location functions, and the manner in which they are combined to exploit the topological structure of characters. By virtue of the new pattern description language, POL, developed in this paper, the user may easily write rules to define new patterns for the system to recognize. The system also features scale-invariance and user-definable sensitivity to tilt orientation.