What's Happenin' Now?
Week ending 11-21-97
This week we have had progress in the loading of images into Matlab, and
possible beginnings of a recognition scheme. Having printed and scanned a
number of fonts and sizes of the digits 0-9 (available in courier or
times), we had a collection of jpegs
capable of being read by Matlab. We discovered the simple method of
loading these images into Matlab using the 'imread' function in the image
processing toolbox.
With the image stored as a matrix, we began looking at ways of
attempting to use a matching filter to differentiate one character from
another. We quickly decided that in order for the images to be compared,
they would have to be properly scaled. However, when scaling an image
such as a straight one without a tail, it would turn into a large black
block which visually wouldn't match with a 1 with a tail. Hence, a
thinning algorithm would be necessary to thin large blocks into a single
line. Using various commands in the image processing tool box, we were
able to create a thinning algorithm to scale scanned images to the same
size, but have each stroke in the letter be a single pixel wide in Matlab.
Here are some examples:
Our hope is to have clearly distinguishable digits all scaled to the
same size. This should facilitate correlating images to our model digits.
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