Language free character recognition using character sketch and center of gravity shifting

In this research, we present a heuristic method for character recognition. For this purpose, a sketch is constructed from the image that contains the character to be recognized. This sketch contains the most important pixels of image that are representatives of original image. These points are the most probable points in pixel-by-pixel matching of image that adapt to target image. Furthermore, a technique called “gravity shifting” is utilized for taking over the problem of elongation of characters. The consequence of combining sketch and gravity techniques leaded to a language free character recognition method. This method can be implemented independently for real-time uses or in combination of other classifiers as a feature extraction algorithm. Low complexity and acceptable performance are the most impressive features of this method that let it to be simply implemented in mobile and battery-limited computing devices. Results show that in the best case 86% of accuracy is obtained and in the worst case 28% of recognized characters are accurate. Keyword: Optical character recognition, Image sketch, Center of gravity, Language free OCR