Hand-scan OCR with a one-dimensional image sensor

摘要

We have developed a hand scanning type OCR, an optical character reader, which is applicable to POS terminals, etc. It uses a one-dimensional image sensor for small size and low cost. We developed a new recognition method which can overcome the irregularity of the hand scanning. Our method has two kinds of counters to extract the horizontal line features. One is a black occurrence counter and the other is a front shape counter. Normalizing these data reduces the influence of pattern variation. The method has been tested widely all over the world as a commercial OCR-A font reader.