Application of Template Matching for Optical Character Recognition

Optical character recognition (OCR) is one of the common research problems in the computer vision which is used for industrial processes automation. In this work the algorithm of OCR based on template matching recognition is presented. Algorithm is adopted for character recognition with consideration of low contrast conditions and texture on the background. The main feature of this method is interest area detection and adaptive binarization before pattern matching. The proposed method does not require large set of training samples, which may be critical in some applications. Also algorithm is easy to implement and has low complexity. Testing was conducted on custom dataset under the various conditions of illumination and pattern readability. The quality of the algorithm was estimated using standard binary classifier metrics and the distribution of correlation function in comparison with the template.