SEIUN — a fast and intelligent character recognition system

It is useful for Japanese and Chinese character recognition to use image‐type processing for selection of limited number of candidates in terms of the general characteristics of the entire image (rough classification) and then deciding the final candidate by logical processing (fine classification). In this paper, we describe the architecture and performance of SEIUN (Systolic Elaborated Intelligent Ultra‐High‐Speed Neosystem), which is a fast and intelligent character recognition system integrating image‐type and logical‐type processing. This system has a host computer, an optical image scanner and an image processor developed by the authors. The architecture of the image processor is a pipelined combination of systolic arrays. The performance characteristics are: rough classification of 2965 kinds of printed Chinese characters at a speed of about 200 characters per second. The correct candidate is one of the first three candidates more than 99.99% of the time if all characters are 20‐point size. The image processor executes variable functions by changing parameters, such as recognition by partial image, extraction of blurred regions of character image, alternate use of dictionaries for multifont text, matching by using feature vectors for word recognition, and so on.