The Symbol Recognition Demo provides FlowDesigner networks that are used to recognize
printed text (alphanumeric) extracted from live (real-time)
320x240 color images. The latest RobotFlow toolkit must be installed before
using this demo. FlowDesigner networks provided with this demo are
easy to modify to suit your configuration (image size, video capture hardware).
The idea with this demo is to provide a simple algorithm that extracts characters
from color components. Characters are extracted from the image with a simple
color segmentation algorithm (8 neighbors), with 1 color representing the background and
1 color representing the foreground color (printed text). When probable characters are
found in the image, the algorithm gives incremental pan-tilt-zoom commands to the
camera (if supported by the camera) to get the maximum resolution of the characters
to extract. When the size of the characters is adequate, components are scaled and
sent to a feed forward artificial neural network (ANN) on character at a time.
The output of the ANN, for each character, is used as a probability for each character
to be part of any word in the dictionary.
