Digit classification on signboards for telephone number recognition

This paper presents a digit classification system to recognize telephone numbers written on signboards. Candidate regions of digits are extracted from an image through edge extraction, enhancement and labeling. Since the digits in the images often have skew and slant, the digits are recognized after the skew and slant correction. To correct the skew, Hough transform is used, and the slant is corrected using the method of circumscribing digits with tilted rectangles. In experiments, we tested a total of 1332 images of signboards with 11939 digits. We obtained a digit extraction rate of 99.2% and a correct digit recognition rate of 98.8%.