Adaptive image restoration of text images that contain touching or broken characters

To improve the performance of an optical character recognition (OCR) system, an adaptive technique that restores touching or broken character images is proposed. By using the output from an OCR system and a distorted text image, this technique trains an adaptive restoration filter and then applies the filter to the distorted text image that the OCR system could not recognize. To demonstrate the performance of this technique, two synthesized images containing only touching characters and two synthesized images containing only broken characters were processed. The results show that this technique can improve both pixel and character accuracy of text images containing touching or broken characters.