Electronic Reading Pen: A DSP Based Portable Device for Offline OCR and Bi-linguistic Translation

• Published in: Embedded Software and Systems pp. 180 - 187
• Main Authors: Wang, Qing, Yue, Sicong, Zhao, Rongchun, Feng, David
• Format: Book Chapter Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2005; Springer
• Edition: 1ère éd
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Artificial intelligence; Computer science; control theory; systems; Exact sciences and technology; Pattern recognition. Digital image processing. Computational geometry; Software; Software engineering; Boarded computer; Image segmentation; Circuit design; Software development; Image processing; Optical character recognition; Automatic translation; Linguistics; Chinese; Pattern recognition; Character recognition; Printed character
• ISBN: 3540281282; 9783540281283
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/11535409_25

In the paper, a portable off-line OCR and bi-linguistic translation system (Chinese to English, English to Chinese)—Electronic Reading Pen (ERPen) is designed and implemented. The constitution of ERPen hardware is designed and several modules, including CCD line array acquisition, wheel driven unit, FLASH management and USB interface are implemented. Moreover, the embedded software, consisting of image preprocessing, character segmentation and recognition, and corpus based postprocessing, is also discussed and implemented. A novel segmentation approach, central growth algorithm, is proposed and applied in ERPen system. Experimental results have shown that ERPen is effective to tackle printed character recognition and translation.