Adaptive Histogram of Oriented Gradient for Printed Thai Character Recognition

A similarity of printed Thai characters is a grand challenge of optical character recognition (OCR), especially in case of a variety of font types, sizes, and styles. This paper proposes an effective feature extraction, adaptive histogram of oriented gradient (AHOG), for overcoming the character similarity. The proposed method improves the conventional histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) in two principal phases, which are (i) adaptive partition for gradient images and (ii) adaptive binning for oriented histograms. The former is implemented with quadtree partition based on gradient image variance so as to provide for an effective local feature extraction. The later is implemented with non-uniform mapping technique, so that the AHOG descriptor can be constructed with minimal errors. Based on 59,408 single character images equally divided into training and testing samples, the experimental results show that the AHOG method outperforms the conventional HOG and state-of-the-art methods, including scale space histogram of oriented gradient (SSHOG), pyramid histogram of oriented gradient (PHOG), multilevel histogram of oriented gradient (MHOG), and HOG column encoding algorithm (HOG-Column). © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.