Camera-based Kanji OCR for mobile-phones: practical issues

A camera based optical character reader (OCR) for Japanese Kanji characters was implemented on a mobile phone. This OCR has three key features. The first is discriminative feature extraction (DFE) which enables a character classifier needing only small memory size. The second is a word segmentation method specially designed for looking up Japanese words in a dictionary. The third feature is a GUI suitable for a mobile phone. A prototype mobile phone Kanji OCR was constructed and experimentally tested. Recognition accuracy of over 95% was obtained under the best conditions, which shows the potential of our prototype as a new type of electronic dictionary.