Abstract:
This paper presents a new invariant character recognition (ICR) algorithm called as
Symmetry Axis based Feature Extraction and Recognition (SAFER) for recognizing
translation, rotation and scale invariant optical characters. Unlike most previous ICR
algorithms, SAFER puts emphasis on both simplicity and generalization ability for
recognizing invariant characters. SAFER uses the axis of symmetry of character and a
simple radial coding to extract invariant features from character. The use of ANN as a
classifier in SAFER increases its generalization ability. SAFER has been tested on two wellknown
fonts Arial and Tahoma that are widely used for representing English characters.
These fonts have been subject of many studies in ICR. The experimental results show that
SAFER can produce high recognition rate with good generalization ability.
