Patent ID: 6345119
Filing Date: 2002-02-05
Classification: G06K

Abstract:
A character recognition apparatus recognizing a handwritten character in image data in a document, comprising:a same writer entry area extracting unit extracting an area to which characters are written by a same writer from the image data in the document; a feature vector computing unit computing a feature vector of each character in all characters in the area extracted by said same writer entry area extracting unit; a character recognition unit determining a character category of each character based on a distance between the feature vector of each character computed by said feature vector computing unit and a reference vector entered in a dictionary; a clustering unit recognizing each feature vector to be a cluster, and performing a clustering process by sequentially integrating clusters whose distance is the closest; a clustering unit recognizing each feature vector to be a cluster, and performing a clustering process by sequentially integrating clusters whose distance is the closest; a comparing unit comparing a clustering result from the clustering unit with the character recognition result from the character recognition unit and outputting a compared result; a character recognition result amending unit amending the character category of a first integrated cluster to the character category of a second integrated cluster using the compared result when the integrated clusters are different from each other and outputting an amended character recognition result indicative thereof; and a clustering result storage unit storing the clustering result from the clustering unit, wherein the character recognition result amending unit amends the clustering result stored in the clustering result storage unit to the amended character recognition result.