JPH0514953B2 - - Google Patents

Description

[Detailed Description of the Invention] [Industrial Application Field] The present invention relates to a collation device that collates a combination of a plurality of characters read from a medium as a word.
In particular, the present invention relates to a verification device capable of high-speed verification.

In recent years, advances in OCR have been remarkable, and OCR, which is capable of printing alphanumeric characters and kana characters, and reading handwritten characters, is widely used in form processing operations, etc. Development of word recognition technology is also active, and various methods are being tried.

In this type of OCR, when a word is made up of multiple kanji, recognition accuracy is improved by recognizing each kanji and then comparing the combination of kanji with a word dictionary. Therefore, when performing such verification, a method of performing verification at high speed is desired.

[Conventional technology]

Figure 3 shows a block diagram of OCR for Japanese characters, which targets handwritten characters including kanji.

In the figure, form 1 is a form in which the customer's address, name, product name, etc. are written in each field.

The reading unit 2 has a function of scanning the reflected light of the light irradiated onto the form 1 through a lens system 21 with an image sensor 22, reading one frame of characters, and transmitting the characters as image data to the binarization circuit 3. have

The main control section 4 has a function of controlling each section and executing a character reading and recognition processing program.

The image memory 5 stores binarized image data, that is, image data of read characters.

The character cutting circuit 6 has a function of cutting out one character from one frame of characters stored in the image memory 5 and sending it to the recognition circuit 10 based on the format information sent from the format information memory 9.

The feature extraction circuit 7 has a function of extracting character features sent from the recognition circuit 10, such as the number of strokes of the character, curve coefficients, etc., and sending them to the recognition circuit 10.

The dictionary memory 8 stores characteristics of characters serving as recognition standards, that is, characteristics of characters such as kanji, hiragana, katakana, English letters, numbers, symbols, etc. The dictionary memory 8 stores characteristics of characters such as kanji, hiragana, katakana, English letters, numbers, symbols, etc. It has a function to send to.

The format information memory 9 stores information indicating the character entry position and word length on the form 1, and stores the read character entry position or word length etc. in the image memory 5, the single character cutting circuit 6, and has a function of sending it to the recognition circuit 10.

The recognition circuit 10 receives from the feature extraction circuit 7 the features of the characters sent from the single character extraction circuit 6, compares them with the features of the characters sequentially sent from the dictionary memory 8, determines the degree of matching, and determines the degree of matching. Character codes are set as candidate strings in order, and sequentially stored in the image memory 5.
Recognizes the characters in the format information memory 9.
A word code is constructed by combining the character codes of candidate characters according to the word length from the word candidate string memory 1.
It has a function to send to 1.

The word candidate string memory 11 is a storage means for storing the code of the word candidate string sent from the recognition circuit 10.

The comparison circuit 12 has a function of comparing and collating the character code combinations of the word candidate string sent from the word candidate string memory 11 and the words sent from the word dictionary memory 13, and outputting words with a high degree of matching as candidates. .

The word dictionary memory 13 is a storage means for storing word codes as a dictionary.

Since it has such a configuration and function, the character recognition method will be explained. First, the characters on the form 1 are read and the binarized image data is stored in the image memory 5.

Next, the image data is sent to the single character cutting circuit 6,
Based on the character position information sent from the format information memory 9, one character is cut out and sent to the recognition circuit 10.

The recognition circuit 10 sends the input character data to the feature extraction circuit 7, which extracts and receives the features of the character data. Therefore, the characteristics of the characters are sequentially read out from the dictionary memory 8 and compared with the characteristics of the character data.
Characters with a high degree of matching are recognized as candidate characters, and candidate word codes are organized and output based on word lengths based on information from the format information memory 9.

The output candidate word code candidate string is stored in the word candidate string memory 11 and further sent to the comparison circuit 12. On the other hand, the word code from the word dictionary memory 13 is sent to the comparison circuit 12, where it is compared with the candidate word code. If the word code matches as a result of the comparison, it means that the word exists, and the candidate word code c is output. Ru.

The image data stored in the image memory 5 in this manner is sequentially character-recognized, word-matched, and output.

[Problem that the invention seeks to solve]

In the conventional method described above, since the input word code is sequentially compared with the word code stored in the word dictionary memory 13 as a word matching method, there is a problem that the amount of comparison processing is large and the matching speed is slow.

[Means for solving problems]

The present invention stores the presence or absence of a word in a word dictionary memory using the code of the word as an address, and stores the presence or absence of the word using a different code. This is a verification device that reads out and determines the code indicating the presence or absence of an object, thereby solving the above-mentioned problems.

[Effect]

According to the present invention, instead of the conventional method of sequentially collating an input word code with word codes stored in a word dictionary memory, the presence or absence of a word is determined by using a word code as an address in the word dictionary memory using different symbols. For example, it is stored as "1" and "0", and using the word code input during verification as an address, the "1" or "0" at that storage location is read to determine whether the word exists. This enables high-speed processing because matching can be performed only by searching.

〔Example〕

An embodiment of the present invention will be described below with reference to FIGS. 1 and 2. FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an embodiment of the present invention, and FIG. 2 is an explanatory diagram of FIG. 1. The same reference numerals indicate the same objects throughout the figures.

In FIG. 1, the main control unit 4a performs recognition processing based on the characteristics of the image data of the read characters, and also controls the encoded word dictionary memory (described later) to collate the words organized based on the results. It has the function of performing processing.

The encoded word dictionary memory 14 is a storage means that uses the code of a word as an address and stores the presence or absence of a word using a different code. That is, if a word code is used as an address and a word exists at that storage location as a code, for example, "1",
If the item does not exist, "0" is stored.

The comparison circuit 12 described in the conventional example is omitted.

Having such a configuration and function, the word matching method after recognition processing in the recognition circuit 10 will be explained. First, the candidate string of candidate word codes output from the recognition circuit 10 is stored in the word candidate string memory 11. Ru.

The candidate word codes stored in the word candidate string memory 11 are sent to the encoded word dictionary memory 14,
The candidate word code is searched as an address, the code at the storage location is read, and "1" or "0" is output and sent to the word candidate string memory 11. For example, as shown in Figure 2, if the input word is "Fuji", the code (C9C9,
The encoded word dictionary memory 14 is searched using addresses a and b for BBCE) and the code is read.

Thus, if the code is "1", it is determined that the word exists, and if the code is "0", it is determined that the word does not exist. Therefore, when the value is "1", candidate word code c is output. .

In this manner, high-speed verification can be performed by searching the encoded word dictionary memory 14 using the word code of the word candidate string inputted to the word candidate string memory 11 as an address.

In the above description, the word candidate string output from the recognition circuit 10 is immediately input to the word candidate string memory 11 for processing. However, the output from the recognition circuit 10 may be sequentially stored in a storage means such as a floppy disk. A similar effect can be obtained by placing it in place and processing it all at once.

〔Effect of the invention〕

As explained above, according to the present invention, there is an effect that matching of word candidates can be processed at high speed.

[Brief explanation of drawings]

FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an embodiment according to the present invention, FIG. 2 is an explanatory diagram of FIG. 1, and FIG. 3 is a block diagram showing a conventional method. In the figure, 4 and 4a are main control units, 5 is an image memory, 6 is a single character extraction circuit, 7 is a feature extraction circuit,
8 is a dictionary memory, 9 is a format information memory,
10 is a recognition circuit, 11 is a word candidate string memory, 12
13 is a comparison circuit, and 14 is a coded word dictionary memory.

Claims (1)

[Claims] 1. A collation device for determining whether or not an input word exists in a word dictionary memory, comprising a word dictionary memory that uses a word code as an address and stores the presence or absence of the word with a different code, A collation device characterized in that when collating an input word, the code of the input word is used as an address and a code indicating the presence or absence of the word is read out from the word dictionary memory to make a determination.