Patent GB-1180290-A (GB)
Title: Apparatus for Recognising a Pattern
Inventor: GENCHI HIROSHI
IPC: G06V30/168
Filed: 1967-10-26
Abstract: 1,180,290. Character recognition. TOKYO SHIBAURA ELECTRIC CO. Ltd. 26 Oct., 1967 [31 Oct., 1966 (3)], No. 48752/67. Heading G4R. In pattern recognition apparatus, pattern signals are quantized and then divided into a number of channels, primary and secondary pattern characteristics for each channel being derived, the secondary from the primary, the pattern being identified from the combination of the secondary characteristics and tertiary characteristics derived from a connection relationship between the secondary characteristics of adjacent channels. Character signals from a raster scan of a character, after quantization, are provided from 501 in Fig. 2, to be thinned and reduced at gate 55 and OR gate 59 respectively, gates 55 looking at successive 3 x 4 portions of the raster in shift register 53 and OR gate 59 looking at successive 3 bit L portions of the raster in shift register 57. Reduction thus halves the number of rows in the raster. The output from Fig. 2 at 500 is fed to a shift register (61, Fig. 4, not shown) to enable gates 70 (also in Fig. 6) to look at successive 3 x 3 portions of the reduced raster to detect primary line characteristics, each portion having (a part of) one row of the raster in common with the portion above and one row in common with the portion below. A set of three rows, each having a row in common with sets above and below is called a channel. The primary characteristics are used to obtain secondary line and shape characteristics by table look-up in memory 73 using address modification by adder 71. The secondary characteristics, stored at 75, are combined with tertiary characteristics from AND gate 807 (see below) and compared 76 with corresponding data relating to standard characters from memory 82, the closest match being detected using "penalty" counter 80 and minimum detector 85 to identify the character. Fig. 8 shows the deriving of tertiary characteristics from the stream of primary characteristics. Block 801 produces a pulse for each position in the stream which contains a secondary characteristic, counter 802 and gate 803 inserting a pulse 1 into shift register 804 whenever no more than three consecutive positions have a characteristic. Register 804 holds a row of the raster plus an extra bit position, the rightmost position being reset to 0 on going from one channel to the next. Register 804 feeds onerow register 806 and both feed logic 805, 807 as shown to produce the tertiary characteristics. The latter indicate whether the features in the corresponding channels are joined to those in the respective adjacent (lower-ordered) channels at the left or not. "No feature" or "no recognition" outputs at various stages of the whole system can cause repetitive thinning and reducing by changing over switches 510, 520 in Fig. 2, and can widen the field of the character scanner. In an alternative (Figs. 12, 13, not shown) to Fig. 2, the character is reconstituted in a stack of shift registers connected end to end, being shifted in from the bottom right until character signals appear at the top. Then all the registers are shifted to the left until character signals appear at the left edge of the stack. The horizontal and vertical lengths are now detected and if the character is too large it is reduced by shifting the character signals from the stack into a shift register and logically combining (equations given) the bit signals from successive 2 x 2 squares of the raster. The signals from each horizontal scan of the raster were ORed into a further shift register when the scan was first completely in the stack so that the further register finally held a shadow projection of the character. This was shifted to the left when the stack was. Horizontal length was found by sensing this register and vertical length by sensing the stack.