Handwriting recognition with simple training

Well, I decided to workout myself on my question to solve above problem. What I wanted is to implement a simpl OCR using KNearest or SVM features in OpenCV. And below is what I did and how. ( it is just for learning how to use KNearest for simple OCR purposes).

1) My first question was about letter_recognition.data file that comes with OpenCV samples. I wanted to know what is inside that file.

It contains a letter, along with 16 features of that letter.

And this SOF helped me to find it. These 16 features are explained in the paperLetter Recognition Using Holland-Style Adaptive Classifiers. ( Although I didn't understand some of the features at end)

2) Since I knew, without understanding all those features, it is difficult to do that method. I tried some other papers, but all were a little difficult for a beginner.

So I just decided to take all the pixel values as my features. (I was not worried about accuracy or performance, I just wanted it to work, at least with the least accuracy)

I took below image for my training data:

( I know the amount of training data is less. But, since all letters are of same font and size, I decided to try on this).

To prepare the data for training, I made a small code in OpenCV. It does following things:

1. It loads the image.
2. Selects the digits ( obviously by contour finding and applying constraints on area and height of letters to avoid false detections).
3. Draws the bounding rectangle around one letter and wait for key press manually. This time we press the digit key ourselves corresponding to the letter in box.
4. Once corresponding digit key is pressed, it resizes this box to 10x10 and saves 100 pixel values in an array (here, samples) and corresponding manually entered digit in another array(here, responses).
5. Then save both the arrays in separate txt files.

At the end of manual classification of digits, all the digits in the train data( train.png) are labeled manually by ourselves, image will look like below:

Below is the code I used for above purpose ( of course, not so clean):

import sys

import numpy as np
import cv2

im = cv2.imread('pitrain.png')
im3 = im.copy()

gray = cv2.cvtColor(im,cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
blur = cv2.GaussianBlur(gray,(5,5),0)
thresh = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(blur,255,1,1,11,2)

#################      Now finding Contours         ###################

contours,hierarchy = cv2.findContours(thresh,cv2.RETR_LIST,cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)

samples =  np.empty((0,100))
responses = []
keys = [i for i in range(48,58)]

for cnt in contours:
    if cv2.contourArea(cnt)>50:
        [x,y,w,h] = cv2.boundingRect(cnt)

        if  h>28:
            cv2.rectangle(im,(x,y),(x+w,y+h),(0,0,255),2)
            roi = thresh[y:y+h,x:x+w]
            roismall = cv2.resize(roi,(10,10))
            cv2.imshow('norm',im)
            key = cv2.waitKey(0)

            if key == 27:  # (escape to quit)
                sys.exit()
            elif key in keys:
                responses.append(int(chr(key)))
                sample = roismall.reshape((1,100))
                samples = np.append(samples,sample,0)

responses = np.array(responses,np.float32)
responses = responses.reshape((responses.size,1))
print "training complete"

np.savetxt('generalsamples.data',samples)
np.savetxt('generalresponses.data',responses)

Now we enter in to training and testing part.

For testing part I used below image, which has same type of letters I used to train.

For training we do as follows:

1. Load the txt files we already saved earlier
2. create a instance of classifier we are using ( here, it is KNearest)
3. Then we use KNearest.train function to train the data

For testing purposes, we do as follows:

1. We load the image used for testing
2. process the image as earlier and extract each digit using contour methods
3. Draw bounding box for it, then resize to 10x10, and store its pixel values in an array as done earlier.
4. Then we use KNearest.find_nearest() function to find the nearest item to the one we gave. ( If lucky, it recognises the correct digit.)

I included last two steps ( training and testing) in single code below:

import cv2
import numpy as np

#######   training part    ############### 
samples = np.loadtxt('generalsamples.data',np.float32)
responses = np.loadtxt('generalresponses.data',np.float32)
responses = responses.reshape((responses.size,1))

model = cv2.KNearest()
model.train(samples,responses)

############################# testing part  #########################

im = cv2.imread('pi.png')
out = np.zeros(im.shape,np.uint8)
gray = cv2.cvtColor(im,cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
thresh = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(gray,255,1,1,11,2)

contours,hierarchy = cv2.findContours(thresh,cv2.RETR_LIST,cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)

for cnt in contours:
    if cv2.contourArea(cnt)>50:
        [x,y,w,h] = cv2.boundingRect(cnt)
        if  h>28:
            cv2.rectangle(im,(x,y),(x+w,y+h),(0,255,0),2)
            roi = thresh[y:y+h,x:x+w]
            roismall = cv2.resize(roi,(10,10))
            roismall = roismall.reshape((1,100))
            roismall = np.float32(roismall)
            retval, results, neigh_resp, dists = model.find_nearest(roismall, k = 1)
            string = str(int((results[0][0])))
            cv2.putText(out,string,(x,y+h),0,1,(0,255,0))

cv2.imshow('im',im)
cv2.imshow('out',out)
cv2.waitKey(0)

And it worked, below is the result I got:

Here it worked with 100% accuracy. I assume this is because all the digits are of same kind and same size.

But any way, this is a good start to go for beginners ( I hope so).

1. fix DPI (if needed) 300 DPI is minimum
2. fix text size (e.g. 12 pt should be ok)
3. try to fix text lines (deskew and dewarp text)
4. try to fix illumination of image (e.g. no dark part of image)
5. binarize and de-noise image

There is no universal command line that would fit to all cases (sometimes you need to blur and sharpen image). But you can give a try to TEXTCLEANER from Fred's ImageMagick Scripts.

If you are not fan of command line, maybe you can try to use opensource scantailor.sourceforge.net or commercial bookrestorer.