BANGALORE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

K. R. Road, V. V. Puram, Bengaluru – 560004

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION
Presented By
Abhishek Gangwar
1BI15CS004

Under the Guidance of

Prof. N. Thanuja
Assistant Professor
Dept. of CS&E
 INTRODUCTION
• Optical character recognition or optical character reader, often abbreviated
as OCR, is the electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed
text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a
document ,from subtitle text superimposed on an image.
• The universal OCR system consists of four main steps which are image
acquisition and preprocessing, feature extraction and Classification.
• The performance of OCR directly depends on the quality of input image or
document.
• Early versions needed to be trained with images of each character, and worked
on one font at a time. Advanced systems capable of producing a high degree of
recognition accuracy for most fonts are now common, and with support for a
variety of digital image file format inputs.
 LITERATURE SURVEY
1. “Optical character recognition using backpropogation neural
network” 2016 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Electrical & Computer
engineering By Shyla Afroge, Boshir Ahmed, Firoz Mahmud

Methodology
• This paper represents an Artificial Neural Network based approach for the
recognition of English characters using feed forward neural network.
• It explains the Optical character recognition(OCR)model to extract characters
from document and classify them.
Stages of Proposed OCR system
Line Extraction method
Limitations:
• The character extraction approach described in the work is unable to extract
characters for those languages in which characters are connected to form words.
2. “Implementation of Devanagri Character Recognition System Through Pattern
RecognitionTechniques” at International Conference on Trends in Electronics and
Informatics By Ms Snehal Pachpande, Prof Anagha Chaudhari, May 2017.

Methodology
• This paper talks about Character Recognition with main attentiveness for
Segmentation part which includes:
a) Line segmentation
b) Character Segmentation
c) Word segmentation
Proposed OCR System
Limitations
• It works only with scripts similar to devanagari.
3. “Optical character recognition using KNN on custom image dataset” by
Tapan kumar Hazra, Dhirendra Pratap Singh, Nikunj Daga , 2017,IEEE.

Methodology
• This OCR extract distinct features from the input image for classifying its
contents as characters specifically letters and digits.
• The positive aspect of this work is that any custom image can be used for
the purpose of training the classifier.
Algorithm Steps are:
• Training image is converted into a grey-scale, blurred, threshold and
flattened image to understand the image features and differentiate between
the objects(characters) and unwanted background .
• From the contours with data, features are extracted for each character and
stored in a numpy array. Then this array and an array containing labels are
combined and stored in a text file.
• The saved text files are loaded. Then a KNN classifier object is created
using cv2, which is trained using the text file.
• Images are tested and extracted from contours which are the resized,
flattened and cropped.
• Most matching features are obtained and displayed as string using KNN
find nearest function.
Limitations
• Computation cost is quite high because we need to compute distance of each query
instance of all training samples .
• Use of lexicons can only increase accuracy.
• Distance based learning is not clear which type of distance to use and which
attribute to use to produce best results as here assumed to be euclidean distance.
4.“The application of Deep Convolutional Denoising Autoencoder for Optical
Character Recognition ”at International Conference on Soft Computing, Intelligent
System and Information Technology by Christopher Wiraatmaja, Kartika Gunadi, Iwan
Njoto ,2017 IEEE.

Methodology
• This paper talks about using convolutional denoising auto-encoder as a
preprocessing method in OCR processes.
• It also talks about the best way to find to enhance the quality of document
images before passing OCR software reads it.
(a)OCR system process,(b)Autoencoder training process
Limitations
• For better output in the denoise process, this research needs a good quality
training dataset and a better data augmentation method, which research
still has not found.
5 . “Improved Optical Character Recognition with Deep Neural Network” at 2018
IEEE 14th International Colloquium on Signal Processing & Its Applications (CSPA)
by Tan Chiang Wei, U.U Sheikh, Ab Rahman.

Methodology
• In this work, deep neural network using Inception V3 is used to train and
perform OCR.
• It proposes to apply deep neural network with transfer learning for
character recognition.
• It also talks about reducing the error rates by 21.5% from existing OCR’s.
• Transfer learning based on Inception V3 model implemented along with pre-trained
model.

Limitations
• Training second network for classfication takes very long time.
 APPLICATIONS
• Conversion of handwritten document into structural text form.
• Number Plate Detection.
• Reading Bank cheques.
• Humanoid robots to solve mathematical equations.
• In hospitals to read forms.
 REFERENCES
[1] “Optical character recognition using backpropogation neural network”
2016 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Electrical & Computer
engineering By Shyla Afroge, Boshir Ahmed, Firoz Mahmud
[2] “Implementation of Devanagri Character Recognition System Through
Pattern RecognitionTechniques” at International Conference on Trends in
Electronics and Informatics By Ms Snehal Pachpande, Prof Anagha
Chaudhari,May 2017.
[3] “Optical character recognition using KNN on custom image dataset” Tapan
kumar Hazra, Dhirendra Pratap Singh, Nikunj Daga , August 2017,IEEE.
[4] “The application of Deep Convolutional Denoising Autoencoder for
Optical Character Recognition ”at International Conference on Soft
Computing, Intelligent System and Information Technology by Christopher
Wiraatmaja, Kartika Gunadi, Iwan Njoto ,September,2017 ,IEEE.
[5] “Improved Optical Character Recognition with Deep Neural Network” at
2018 IEEE 14th International Colloquium on Signal Processing & Its
Applications (CSPA) by Tan Chiang Wei, U.U Sheikh, Ab Rahman.