EXTRACTION OF INCLINED CHARACTER STRINGS FROM UNFORMED DOCUMENT IMAGES USING THE CONFIDENCE VALUE OF A CHARACTER RECOGNIZER

A method for extracting and recognizing character strings from unforme d document images, which have inclined character strings and have no s tructure at all, is described. To process such kinds of unformed docum ents, previous schemes, which are intended only to deal with documents containing nothing but horizontal or vertical strings of characters, do not work well. Our method is based on the idea that the processes o f recognition and extraction of character patterns should operate toge ther, and on the characteristic that the character patterns are locate d close to each other when they belong to the same string. The method has been implemented and applied to several images. The experimental r esults show the robustness of our method.