Proportional Spaced Text Recognition Apparatus and Method

1. "Method and Apparatus for Character Recognition Employing a Dead-Band Correlator," Ser. No. 470,241, filed Feb. 28, 1983 abandoned in favor of continuation application Ser. No. 902,071, filed Aug. 27, 1986, now Pat. No. 4,700,401, issued Oct. 13, 1987.

2. "Optical Character Isolation System, Apparatus and Method," Ser. No. 535,410, filed Sept. 23, 1983.

The present invention relates to an optical character recognition system and method. More particularly, the present invention relates to an OCR-type system which provides recognition of video character data representing text on a document having proportional spacing and/or fixed pitch formats, as well as recognition of text having accented characters.

OCR-type systems have long been known in the art in conjunction with sophisticated word processing systems implemented in the business environment, as well as a personal user environment, Many such systems operate with a proportional spacing format, which provides for proportional spacing for each line of text.

This proportional spacing is a desirable feature in many such word processing systems such as in preparation of legal briefs and memoranda, marketing projections and the like.

One problem with prior art OCR-type systems is that, in general, there is no capability of distinguishing between proportional spacing formats and fixed pitch formats, such as may be used with older type equipment. However, there are many applications where it would be desirable to have a recognition capability between proportional spaced formats and fixed pitch formats. Prior art systems have, in general, not been able to provide a recognition technique so that either type of format can be utilized in a word processing system.

In addition, OCR scanning systems have not in general been able to provide for accurate recognition of accented characters, such as appear in many Western European languages. As the word processing capability is expanded to include Western European text, a serious limitation is the deficiency of prior art systems of not being able to recognize accented characters.

It is an object of the present invention to provide a proportional spaced text recognition apparatus and method.

In one embodiment, the present invention is utilized in an optical character recognition system. The invention provides recognition of video data representative of proportional spacing or fixed pitch formats, and can convert between the different types of formats.

The present invention also provides for recognition and processing of accented characters which are common in Western European type texts.

Other objects and features of the present invention will become apparent from the following detailed description when taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.

FIG. 1 depicts a representation of a video buffer.

FIG. 2 depicts a representation of a recognition buffer storing the letter "S".

FIG. 3 depicts an illustration of page image records (PIR's).

FIG. 4 depicts a representation of two accented characters, where the placement of the accent above the character varies.

FIG. 5 depicts a representation of an oversized accented character.

FIG. 6 depicts a representation of a base character and remnant buffer, respectively.

FIG. 7 depicts a flow chart illustrating the sequence of steps for recognizing an accented character.

FIG. 8 depicts a representation of a cloud mask for an accented character.

FIGS. 9A and B depict the segmentation of an accented character into a base character and an accent portion.

FIG. 10 depicts a flow chart illustrating the process of recombining accented characters.

FIG. 11 depicts a flow chart illustrating the process of pitch determination.

FIG. 12 depicts a representation of touching characters "Th".

FIG. 13 depicts a representation of the segmented characters of FIG. 12.

FIG. 14 depicts a flow chart illustrating the process of recognition of touching characters.

FIG. 15 depicts a representation of the segmented characters of FIG. 13.

FIG. 16 depicts a flow chart illustrating the process of recognizing multiple characters within one character buffer.

FIG. 17 depicts a representation of multiple characters which can be stored in one character buffer.

FIG. 18 depicts a representation of separated multiple characters of FIG. 17.

FIG. 19 depicts a representation of a proportional space input and an adjusted fixed pitch output.

The present invention relates to optical character recognition systems. Particularly desirable OCR isolation and recognition techniques are described in the two cross-referenced applications identified above, the details of which are hereby incorporated by reference.

In general, an optical character recognition (OCR) system can be subdivided into three major subsystems. These are:

1. Character Segmentation--handles page detection, video acquisition, pre-recognition noise filtering, the identification of character fields suitable for recognition and the creation of character image buffers for use by character recognition.

2. Character Recognition--attempts to identify an unknown character image provided by character segmentation. Recognition technology may include some combination of correlation against known masks, feature analysis, decision trees or other recognition techniques.

3. Page Composition--attempts to reconstruct the page into ASCII coded lines of text (American Standard Code for Information Interchange--ASCII--is a standard code that assigns specific bit patterns to each sign, symbol, numeral, letter and operation in a specific set). Included in this subsystem may be contextual and positional analysis, post-recognition noise filtering, text spacing and skew adjustment.

The relative complexity of these subsystems will vary depending on the nature of the text read and the accuracy desired. Early OCR systems for typed pages used OCR specific fonts, such as OCR-A, which allowed little or no random noise such as dirt, paper imperfections, copier marks, etc. For these systems, simple character segmentation, recognition and page composition techniques yielded acceptable results. Later OCR systems used improved character recognition schemes to allow the use of standard office fonts, such as Prestige Elite, but were still intolerant to problems affecting character segmentation, such as noise, skew and touching characters. These systems were quite suitable in an environment of carefully prepared input documents, but were unacceptable when the input documents took the form of standard archived or correspondence pages. To account for these problems, a system using character segmentation by iterative page decomposition and page composition by character baseline analysis was developed. These two additional techniques served to eliminate such problems as skew and noise. The following describes the methodology used to implement character segmentation, character recognition and page composition in one of these later systems.

Briefly, character segmentation by iterative page decomposition works as follows:

Input: Character segmentation assumes as input a video buffer acting as a window onto an input document. The representation of a video buffer illustrated in FIG. 1 contains a digitized image of a portion of the document, which contains recognizable typed text as well as unrecognizable features such as noise, forms features, letterheads, logos, underlines and signatures. The digitized image in the video buffer must be tall enough to hold the tallest recognizable character and as wide as the document currently being processed. The top pixel row of the video buffer may be discarded and a new pixel row added to the bottom of the buffer, in effect moving the buffer window down the document being processed. Any pixel in the video buffer may be examined or altered by the software or hardware implementing this technique.

Output: The primary output of character segmentation is a series of recognition input buffers, each containing a digitized image of a localized feature assumed to be a single character, such as the letter "S" illustrated in FIG. 2, as well as the horizontal and vertical pixel location of the feature. Secondary outputs of character segmentation include the location and length of any underlines detected, as well as the location and size of features too tall and too wide to be considered recognizable characters.

Method: The video buffer is moved down the document until the top row of the buffer contains some black. If the feature containing the leftmost black pixel is small isolated noise, it is erased from the video buffer, and processing continues with the search for black. If the feature is large enough, it is assumed to be part of a character which is itself a part of a word of text. The leftmost edge of the word is located by searching to the left until a tall, wide white region is found. Individual characters within the word are then segmented out, left to right, copied into recognition buffers and erased from the video buffer. During the segmentation process, overlapping characters, touching characters, underlines and oversized features are detected and processed. After each noise feature, word or oversized feature is processed, it is erased from the video buffer and the buffer is again moved down until the top row contains black. The entire page is thus decomposed into a series of noise, oversized and character features without any requirement to locate word or line baselines or skew angles. Features are erased from the video buffer after they are processed to insure that each feature is processed once and only once. Isolating text by word instead of by line or character provides these basic advantages:

1. Segmentation problems caused by text skew can normally be ignored within a word.

2. A smaller video buffer can be used, since a skewed line requires a much taller buffer than an unskewed line, but a skewed word is not significantly taller than an unskewed word.

3. Individual words do not normally touch other words, whereas individual characters often touch other characters within a word, therefore segmentation by word is less prone to error than segmentation by character.

The character recognition technique works as follows:

Input: The primary input of the character recognition technique is a series of recognition input buffers, each containing a digitized image of a localized feature assumed by the character segmentation software to be a single character, as well as the horizontal and vertical pixel location of the feature, as illustrated in FIG. 2.

Output: The primary output of the character recognition subsystem is the input recognition buffers with an associated best fit and next best fit ASCII codes for the character in question, along with correlation scores the best fit ASCII.

Method: The character recognition subsystem may be subdivided into two major functions: iterative processing, in which the best match for an unknown character is determined, and typestyle recognition, whereby the proper typestyle for a region of text is determined, thereby increasing throughput and accuracy. These two functions are described in detail below.

During iterative processing, the unknown character is passed through a dead-band correlator and compared with a series of masks for known characters. The results of this correlation are then evaluated using tight threshold and separation criteria. If these results are acceptable with tight requirements, then the character is considered recognized with high confidence. If the character fails to meet these tight threshold and separation requirements, then the character undergoes a series of retries to attempt to make the character tightly acceptable. The first retry attempts to insure that the character is properly centered in the recognition buffer. The second level of retry processing attempts to filter small isolated noise from the character field. The third level of retry processing attempts to remove larger isolated noise. The fourth level of retry processing attempts to filter out any portions of an underline which may have been missed by the character segmentation subsystem. The fifth level of retry is a series of stroke width normalizations. These normalizers are "burn," which attempts to reduce the stroke width of very dark characters, and "regrow," which attempts to widen the stroke width of very light characters. If any of these retries causes the unknown character to become tightly acceptable based on threshold and separation, then recognition for the character is complete. If not, then following all retries, a loosely acceptable character can now be accepted with high confidence. Any other characters will be rejected.

Typestyle recognition is initiated at the beginning of each page. Each character is run through each typestyle in the system. Following recognition of each character, the results from each typestyle are evaluated. A character that is rejected in all typestyles is simply rejected. A character that is accepted in at least one font is passed on for further processing. The best typestyle is determined by comparing the level of acceptances for each typestyle. If there is more than one typestyle which recognized the character at the best level of threashold acceptance, the ASCII codes from those typestyles are compared. If all of the typestyles do not agree on the ASCII code designation, then the character is saved in a holding buffer to await typestyle determination. If the ASCII codes are all equal, the character is accepted, and the low scores of all the typestyles are added to a score counter. Any typestyle that rejects the character is eliminated. Also, any typestyle whose score counter goes over a threshold value is also eliminated. The correct typestyle for the page is recognized when only one typestyle is still enabled.

Briefly, page composition by character baseline analysis works as follows:

Input: The technique assumes as primary input a series of character recognition buffers, each containing a best fit and next best fit ASCII value and correlation score (less likely characters and scores may also be used) as well as the X-Y page pixel origin of the character. Secondary inputs include records describing underlines and forms/logo features, as for example, seen in FIG. 2.

Output: The primary output of the technique is an ASCII data string which may be displayed on a teletype compatible display or printer to recreate an accurate (to within a character) image of the original input document. Secondary outputs include escape sequences embedded in the data stream, describing underline and forms/logo feature origin and size, exact line X-Y origin, exact page length and rejected and post-processed characters.

Method: The method is broken down into two steps: word reconstruction and line reconstruction.

In word reconstruction, characters arriving in recognition buffers from the character recognition process are built back into words and stored in page image records (PIR's). This is done primarily to allow more efficient usage of system memory: since every PIR must contain several bytes of position and linkage information, it is desirable to store as much ASCII information as possible in each PIR. Since characters are not normally isolated from left to right within a word and processed by recognition in the same order, word reconstruction is merely a process of testing if each successive input character is to be appended to the end of the current input PIR. When a word ends or a PIR fills, the old PIR is linked into the active PIR chain in ascending horizontal word origin order, and a new PIR is allocated from a free PIR chain, as illustrated in FIG. 3.

In FIG. 3, line reconstruction is invoked when two or more lines of text are contained in the active PIR chain, or when the free PIR chain is empty. Line reconstruction makes two passes through the active PIR chain. The first pass determines the leftmost PIR of the topmost line in the active PIR chain, and the second pass starts from that leftmost PIR and outputs and restores to the free chain all PIR's on the topmost line.

As each ASCII character is added to a PIR (word), a baseline adjustment appropriate to that ASCII character is applied to the character's base point to yield a character baseline. Character baselines within a word are averaged to form a word baseline. This ASCII calculated baseline is far more accurate than a baseline derived from examination of raw digitized video, since it is resistant to errors caused by random noise and extreme cases (such as "soggy gypsum," which may cause a false baseline due to the occurrence of the many characters below the baseline). This accurate word baseline allows for the implementation of accurate positional post processing of characters such as "P" and "p", as well as accurate detection of subscripts and superscripts.

A series of problems are encountered when attempting to perform OCR on text containing accented characters, as are typically found in Western European languages, and text created on office equipment utilizing proportional space fonts. The major problems are outlined below and a series of techniques for the solution of these problems follows.

Multi-strike Accented Characters: On many print sources, accented characters are formed by more than one stroke. As seen in FIG. 4, the base character is first typed, the carriage is backed up, and the accent is typed above the character. Because of variations in the way printers and typewriters handle these overstrikes, the accented characters are not easily recognized by template matching alone because of differences in the placement of the accent above the character. Another method for recognition of these characters is needed so that accurate results may be obtained.

Proportionally Spaced Text: There are a number of problems which arise when current OCR technology is used to attempt to process text which is typed proportionally. First, because characters are packed closely together, it is possible for two narrow characters, such as "11", illustrated in FIG. 17, to be segmented as one character, which in current systems may mistakenly be recognized as a "U" or an "H" instead of a rejected character. Second, in proportionally spaced text a much larger proportion of characters touch than is typically found in fixed pitch text, so a much higher reject rate is encountered for this reason, as seen in FIG. 13. Lastly, because the text is being output to a device which does not have proportional space capability, the integrity of columns and underlines is lost with the change of spacing, as seen in FIG. 19.

Accented characters represent a special case of problems for character segmentation and recognition. Character segmentation is affected since many accented characters are too tall to fit into one recognition buffer. Truncation of the character so that it fits is not a valid solution, since too much of the data in the accent mark would be lost. Therefore, a technique has been developed whereby anything taller than the recognition buffer is saved in two recognition buffers, a base character and a vertical remnant, thus conserving all data in the character field for recognition. When recognition encounters an accented character, signalled by recognition against one of the "cloud" masks which are generic accented character masks, the base character is recombined with the vertical remnant. The character is then vertically segmented into an accent mark and a base character, which are recognized separately, so as to eliminate any problems with placement of the accent mark. Following recognition of the accent mark and the base character, page composition will attempt to recombine the two ASCII codes into one code for the accented character. If an invalid accent and base character is encountered, then the accent is thrown away, thus eliminating noise from some characters, for example, any accent above an "s" would be illegal, thereby filtering out the noise above the character.

The processing necessary for character segmentation of accented characters is as follows. At the point where a new localized feature which is assumed to be a character is to be moved into a recognition input buffer, the character height is checked against the height of the recognition buffer. If the character is too tall, as seen in FIG. 5, then vertical remnant processing is initiated. The base character is set up to be the height of a recognition buffer and moved into one. Anything left over is moved into a new recognition buffer and both buffers are linked vertically, as seen in FIG. 6.

Recognition processing of accented characters takes as input a recognition buffer which has already been run through the correlation process. Following the correlation process previously described, the following steps are taken to attempt to recognize an accented character.

Step 1. Does character recognize as a "cloud" mask?

If the character in question recognizes as a "cloud" mask (see FIG. 8), then this is the signal that the character is an accented character. A cloud mask is a composite of all possible accent marks for the current character. The major purpose is to offset the base character downwards, and have enough pixels above the base character so that the accent mark does not force too high a mis-score. In any multilingual font, there will be cloud masks for the following base characters: a, e, i, n, o, u, A E, I, N, O, U.

Steps 2, 3, and 4. Is the character an oversized character? Recreate oversized character in recombination buffer. Move single character into recombination buffer.

These steps create an exact copy of what the character in question looked like in the video buffer. This copy is created in a special buffer known as the recombination buffer which is tall enough to hold the maximum height character.

Step 5. Initial separation of accent and base character.

This step looks at the image of the character and determines the most likely place to separate the accent from the base character in the recombination buffer. The initial separation point is determined by white space within the character or a position with small density in the horizontal direction if the accent is touching the base character. The accent and the base character are then moved into two separate recognition buffers, as seen in FIG. 9.

Step 6. Run accent and base character through correlation.

The accent and base character recognition buffers created in either Step 5 or 8 is run against the current font to search for the best match for each. The fonts are arranged such that the accent will only be run against accents, thus eliminating the possibility of an accent being mistakenly recognized as a punctuation symbol, such as a ",".

Step 7. Did the base character recognize the tight threshold?

This step tests to see if the base character is recognized with a high level of confidence.

Step 8. Try next separation point.

If the base character did not recognize then find the next possible position to separate the accent and the base character in the recombination buffer and resegment the accent and the base character and move them into their associated recognition buffers.

Page composition processing of accented characters involves the recombination of the vertically linked pair of character buffers created by recognition (ASCII codes for the accent mark and the base character) into one accented character ASCII code. The steps taken to perform this are as follows (see FIG. 10):

Step 1. Current recognition buffer vertically linked with another or stand-alone accent positionally above a base character?

Steps 2, 3 and 4. Did top recognition buffer recognize as an accent mark?

Is the combination of accent and base character valid?Discard top character.

These steps are used to determine if the vertically linked pair of recognition buffers form a valid accented character. The first test is a check for a well recognized accent mark in the top character buffer. If this test passes, the pair is then tested to see if together they form an accented character (an umlaut above an "a" would be valid, whereas a grave above an "s" would be invalid). If either of these tests fail, then the accent is thrown away as noise.

Step 5. Recombine accent and base character to yield accented character.

This step changes the ASCII code of the base character to be the resultant accented character. Following this recombination, the top buffer is discarded.

For the recognition and page composition subsystems to work most effectively, they must have some indication of the pitch of the text being processed. That is, whether the text is typed in fixed pitch or proportional space (P.S.). The following describes how the character segmentation subsystem computes this pitch information.

In order to determine the pitch of a text region, the pitch of each word is determined using several sources of information: (1) the variation in the spacing between the centers of the characters of the word, (2) the difference in the mean of the character spacing between the word and its neighbors, and (3) the differences in the pitch determined for the word and that of its two neighboring words. Using these three sources of information, the pitch of the text can be determined with an estimated confidence.

Two scores are established for each word, a fixed pitch score and a P.S. score, the values of which depend on the first two information sources mentioned above. The final scores for a word are tallied and the pitch with the larger score value is selected as the correct pitch. Next, the confidence measure of this pitch is determined using the third information source above. The confidence measure can be one of three levels; no confidence, some confidence, and high confidence.

Procedure (see FIG. 11).

Each time a word has been completed by character segmentation, i.e., has been broken up into separate characters, four steps are executed to compute the pitch and its associated confidence level.

Step 1. Two statistics on that word are computed; the mean distance between the centers of the characters, and the deviations per character from this mean.

Step 2. Using the statistics from Step 1, the scores for fixed pitch and P.S. are computed as follows: If the value of the mean distance between characters is within the range established for fixed pitch, a small weight is added to the fixed pitch score. If it is out of that range, a large weight is added to the P.S. score. In the same way, if the deviation per character from this mean is less than a certain threshold, then the fixed pitch score is given additional weight, and if it is greater, then the threshold weight is given to the P.S. score. Based on the values of these two scores, a confidence measure is given to the estimated pitch.

Step 3. In addition to using the statistics generated for the given word, those of the previous and subsequent words are used as well, In particular, the difference in the mean values of the character to character distances, as well as the actual value of this mean distance. If the differences in the means is small, then weight is added to the fixed pitch score; if the difference in the means is large, then weight is added to the P.S. score. In addition, if the actual mean of the previous or subsequent words are out of the fixed pitch range, weight is added to the P.S. score; and if either is within the range, weight is added to the fixed pitch score.

Step 4. The greater of the two scores is chosen as the pitch for the given word, and the last step is to determine the confidence in this pitch. This is done using the pitch estimated for the given word, in context with the pitch of the previous and subsequent words and their associated confidences as computed in Step 2. Based on the similarity, or difference of the neighboring pitches and their respective confidences, the final determination of the pitch and its confidence is made.

By using this method, changes in pitch may be detected as soon as they occur on the page, thus avoiding possible errors.

When two or more characters are touching so that no white path (vertical or kerned) can be found, character segmentation makes a guess as to the best location to separate the character images. This guess works well when the cut is between two serifs. However, in some cases (as in FIG. 13), the selected cut position is wrong. The following details a technique whereby these mis-cut characters can be corrected in character recognition by iteratively making cuts and decisions based on the recognition results.

The input to this process is a recognition buffer which has already been run through the correlation process.

Process (see FIG. 14):

Step 1. Did character recognize with tight threshold acceptance?

This test is a check to see if the current character was not able to be tightly accepted by the correlation process regarding threshold (low score).

Step 2. Is character touching character to its right?

All recognition buffers which are sent from character segmentation to recognition are linked to the recognition buffers which contain the characters to the left and the right.

Each of these links contains a flag which specifies whether the two characters were touching before segmentation was performed (see FIG. 13). This step tests the current character to see if it was touching the character to its right.

Step 3. Recombine characters and correlate character to right.

The first portion of this step is a re-creation of the exact appearance of the touching character pair prior to segmentation in the recombination buffer. The right character of the pair is then run through the correlation process to set up its scores for the following steps.

Step 4. Determine new segmentation point.

Based on the scores of the touching character pair, a new segmentation point is determined. If neither character recognized at all, then the new segmentation point will be three pixels to the right of the original one. If one or both was loosely acceptable based on threshold, then the new segmentation point will be one pixel to the right of the original one. Once the new segmentation point is determined, then the new recognition buffers are formed from the recombination buffer, separated at the new segmentation point. If processing is currently on a later pass, then the scores are compared against the previous scores. If there was an improvement in the scores, then the new segmentation direction will be in the same direction as the previous, but one pixel further out. If the scores got worse, then the previous cut direction is investigated. If the previous cut was to the left, then the new cut will be to the right of the best previous cut point. If the previous cut was to the right, then processing is done and the best scores to date are used for the touching character pair and an invalid segmentation point indication is sent on to Step 5. Once the new segmentation point is determined, then the new recognition buffers are formed from the recombination buffer, separated at the new segmentation point. For the touching character example given in FIG. 13, the result will finally be the two recognition buffers shown in FIG. 15.

Step 5. New segmentation point valid?

This step tests to insure that the new segmentation point determined in Step 4 is valid based on the indicator sent from that step.

Step 6. Correlate left and right characters.

The new pair of recognition buffers is then run through the correlation process to see what kind of improvement, if any, was made.

Step 7. Do both characters now have tight threshold requirement?

This step tests to see if at this point, touching character processing has yielded a pair of tightly acceptable characters based on their low scores.

Step 8. Label left character for page composition.

Touching character processing was not able to resolve the pair of characters to a high degree of satisfaction, due to factors such as overlapped characters, noise, etc. The left character of the pair is labelled as an accepted or rejected character, based on threshold and separation, and passed on to page composition.

Step 9. Does right character have tight acceptance?

Following the release of the left character, the right character is tested for tight acceptance based on threshold.

Step 10. Is right character touching character to its right?

If the right character is not acceptable at this time, then it is tested to see if it is touching the character to its right.

Step 11. Set up for new left and right characters.

If the right character was not acceptable and was touching the character to its right, then the current right character becomes the new left character, and the character to its right becomes the new right character. Thus, strings of touching characters can be resolved into recognizable characters. Processing continues with Step 3.

Steps 12, 13 and 14. Label characters as accept or reject. Label both characters. Label right character.

The character in question is labelled as an accepted or rejected character based on threshold and separation and passed on to page composition.

Often, when dealing with proportionally spaced test, two adjacent small characters can often touch, and therefore be segmented as one character by the character segmentation subsystem. These multiple characters must be resolved by the recognition subsystem. When a character does not recognize, one of the additional character retries involves dividing a single character feature from character segmentation into more than one character when the page is known to be typed in P.S., either from the font or the pitch determined in character segmentation. See FIGS. 17 and 18.

The input to this process is a recognition buffer which has already been run through the correlation process.

Process (see FIG. 16):

Step 1. Did character recognize with tight threshold acceptance?

This test is a check to see if the current character was not able to be tightly accepted by the correlation process regarding threshold (low score).

Step 2. Is page proportionally spaced?

This test determines whether or not the character in question is from a proportionally spaced page. The determining factors in this decision are either the font (each P.S. font contains a flag which identifies it as being proportional space) and/or the pitch determined by the character segmentation process (previously described).

Step 3. Perform double character test.

This test investigates the image in the recognition buffer and attempts to make a determination as to whether or not there may be two characters in the buffer. The tests used and the order in which they are attempted are:

a. Is there a white pixel column between two images in the recognition buffer?

b. Is there a kerned path between two images in the buffer?

c. Is there a small density (1 or 2 pixels) point at which two possible images may touch?

Step 4. Is image in recognition buffer a possible double character?

This step checks to see if any of the tests in Step 3 were successful.

Step 5. Move character image into recombination buffer and separate.

The character image in question is moved into the recombination buffer and the two possible characters are separated at the point determined in Step 3 and placed in recognition buffers.

Step 6. Correlate resultant characters.

The two recognition buffers formed in Step 5 are run through the correlation process.

Step 7. Did the scores improve?

The correlation scores for both new characters are compared against the score for the original character. If both are less than the original, then it is assumed that a good double character separation was performed.

Step 8. Restore original character.

If the double character separation did not improve the correlation results as compared to the original character, then it is assumed that the original single character is the best guess for the character image. The original character and its correlation data is restored in the recognition buffer.

Step 9. Are both characters tightly acceptable?

This tests to see if the stores for both characters formed signal a tight acceptance based on threshold (low score).

Step 10. Label character(s).

Following any of the above operations, characters are labelled as either accepted or rejected characters and passed on to page composition.

Step 11. Enter touching character processing.

If some improvement was made with the double character separation, but not enough to accept the character yet, then the character pair is passed on to touching character processing (previously described).

Step 12. Was touching character processing successful?

If following the iterative segmentation and correlation of the double character pair, both are not tightly acceptable based on the threshold requirement, then double character processing is assumed to have failed.

Because of the variations in character size and spacing with proportionally spaced text, it is not possible to simply output the text into a device which handles only fixed pitch and still expect the columns to line up (see FIG. 9). Therefore, a technique has been developed whereby the input proportionally spaced text is converted to a fixed pitch grid so that the integrity of the columns is maintained.

This procedure is implemented during the output phase of the line reconstruction pass of page composition. The inputs are a string of PIR's for the line currently being output. As characters are output from each PIR in the line, a running total is kept of the number of characters output and the total pixel width of the line segment so far. When a large white space (two or more blanks is encountered, the number of characters times a constant pitch (12 pitch was used in this application) is used to determine the length of the line segment following output. This length is compared to the actual pixel length of the line segment. If the fixed pitch length is longer than the actual length, then the horizontal white space is decreased, with a lower limit of at least one blank. If the fixed pitch length is shorter, then the horizontal white space is increased. FIG. 19 shows an example of this process.

A software source code listing for controlling the proportional spaced text and accented character recognitio techniques described above is submitted herewith as Appendix A. The isolation or separation aspect could be utilized in the second above cross-referenced application entitled "Optical Character Isolation System, Apparatus and Method."

Specifically, the Isolation Board 61 illustrated in FIG. 12 of that application could incorporate the teaching of the present invention. Similarly, the recognition aspects of the present invention could be utilized in the first above cross-referenced application entitled "Method and Apparatus for Character Recognition Employing a Dead-Band Correlator." The recognition board illustrated in FIG. 7 of that first application could incorporate the teachings of the present invention. ##SPC1##