The paper discusses ongoing research on the effects of a signing avatar's modeling/rendering features on the perception of sign language animation. It reports a recent study that aimed to determine whether a character's visual style has an effect on how signing animated characters are perceived by viewers. The stimuli of the study were two polygonal characters presenting two different visual st...

In this paper, we propose a new method for the best ranking of OCR word hypotheses in order to increase the chances that the correct hypothesis will be ranked in the first position. This method is based on the images construction of the OCR word hypotheses and the calculation of the dissimilarity scores between these last constructed images and the image to recognize. To evaluate the new propos...

1!aditi~!lallY, ~_ Chin~se or J_ap~ese Optical Character Reader (OCR) has to representeach character category individually as one or more feature prototypes, or a structural description which is a composition of manually derived components such as radicals. Here we propose a new approach in which various kinds of visual similarities between different Chinese characters are analyzed automaticall...

Character segmentation has long been one of the most critical areas of optical character recognition process. Through this operation, an image of a sequence of characters, which may be connected in some cases, is decomposed into sub-images of individual alphabetic symbols. In this paper, segmentation of cursive handwritten script of world’s fourth popular language, Bengali, is considered. Unlik...

A novel technique is presented here for recognition of handwritten compound characters of Bangla alphabet. It advocates for incrementally expanding the number of learned character classes from more frequently occurred to less frequently occurred ones. The work is preceded by a survey for finding the frequencies of occurrences of all Bangla characters in the standard literature. One important fi...

Machine recognition of hand-printed Japanese characters has been an area of great interest for many years. The major problem with this classification task is the huge number of different characters. Applying standard ”state-ofthe-art” techniques, such as the SVM, to multi-class problems of this kind imposes severe problems, both of a conceptual and a technical nature: (i) separating one class f...

Here we describe a framework built upon Tesseract optical character recognition software for transcribing old texts having non-standard fonts. Further, we illustrate our software on creating a digital version of two volumes of a 17 century French text. The volumes consist of 808 pages having 84,366 words, and our system initially correctly transcribes 88% of the words. Further, we identify a me...