An OCLR (Optical Character Locator and Recognizer) for Map Images

This work is part of a bigger project that aims to vectorize maps. At first, we were restricted to topographic maps, afterwards we got interested in other kind of maps (such as architectural and electrical). We include a brief explanation of the global system and then focus on the problem of locating and recognizing characters present on the map.

For character location, we use some information from the previous stages of the vectorizing process (line information); we model characters as sets of short and nearby lines. We use a neural network to recognize the characters. This paper presents all the algorithms and the results we have obtained.