Affine-invariant character recognition by progressive removing

Recognizing characters in scene images suffering from perspective distortion is a challenge. Although there are some methods to overcome this difficulty, they are time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a set of affine-invariant features and a new recognition scheme called progressive removing that can help reduce the processing time. Progressive removing gradually removes less feasible categories and skew angles by using multiple classifiers. We observed that progressive removing and the use of the affine invariant features reduced the processing time by about 60% in comparison to a trivial algorithm without decreasing the recognition rate. (c) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 180(2): 5563, 2012; Published online in Wiley Online Library (). DOI 10.1002/eej.22276