Gabor filters-based feature extraction for character recognition

A new method using Gabor filters for character recognition in gray-scale images is proposed in this paper. Features are extracted directly from gray-scale character images by Gabor filters which are specially designed from statistical information of character structures. An adaptive sigmoid function is applied to the outputs of Gabor filters to achieve better performance on low-quality images. In order to enhance the discriminability of the extracted features, the positive and the negative real parts of the outputs from the Gabor filters are used separately to construct histogram features. Experiments show us that the proposed method has excellent performance on both low-quality machine-printed character recognition and cursive handwritten character recognition. (C) 2004 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.