Optical font recognition based on Gabor filter

Abstract

The font recognition of Chinese characters is an important part in OCR (optical character recognition) system. It is also a main technical challenge due to the similarity of different fonts. The reconstruction quality of layout depends on the accuracy of font recognition. However, the prevalent method of font recognition is predominant font recognition based on the fact that the most layouts are printed in a single font, which makes it impossible to reconstruct the original layout. In this paper, an improved font recognition method of individual character is proposed. The approach consists of three steps. In the first step, the guidance fonts are acquired based on Gabor filter optimized with genetic algorithm (GA). Then a single font recognizer is applied to get the matching results with the help of the guidance fonts and the layout knowledge of font typesetting. Finally, the post-processing of font recognition is fulfilled according to the layout knowledge. Experiments were carried out with samples from newspaper and magazines and the results show that the method is of immense practical and theoretical value.