Patent ID: 7471830

Claim:
A device for recognizing characters in an image, comprising: an input part for receiving the image; a blurring decision part for classifying the received image into character blocks and background blocks, calculating an average energy ratio of the character blocks, and comparing the average energy ratio with a predetermined threshold to determine whether the received image is blurred; an object skew correction part for classifying, if the received image is not blurred, stripes having or exceeding a predetermined length in the received image, calculating direction angles of the classified stripes to measure a skew of an object, determining a skew angle corresponding to the measured skew, and rotating the image by the determined skew angle to correct the skew of the object in the image; an image binarization part for classifying the skew-corrected image into character blocks and background blocks, comparing pixels in the character blocks with a pixel threshold, binarizing the pixels in the character blocks into a brightness value for a character pixel and a brightness value for a background pixel based on the comparison, and binarizing pixels in the background blocks into the brightness value for a background pixel; and a character recognition part for recognizing characters in the binarized image.