Holistic Word Recognition algorithm in detail

Question

Where Can I find algorithm details for holistic word recognition? I need to build a simple OCR system in hardware (FPGAs actually), and the scientific journals seems so abstract?

Are there any open source (open core) codes for holistic word recognition?

Thanks

Answer 1

For an algorithm that is quite suitable for FPGA implementation (embarrassingly parallel) you might look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-correlation

It is fast, and easily implemented.

The only thing is: it recognizes a shape (in your case some text) DEPENDENT of the rotation and size / stretch / skew etc. But if that isn't a problem, it can be very fast and is quite robust. You should only watch out for interpretation problems with characters that are similar (like o and c).

I used it to find default texts on scanned forms to obtain bearings where Region of Interests are and searching in those images (6M pixels) only took around 15 ms with our implementation on a Core2 CPU in a single thread.