| 摘要 |
Apparatus, and an accompanying method, for use in an optical character recognition (OCR) system (5) for locating, e.g., center positions ("hearts") of all desired characters within a field (310; 510) of characters such that the desired characters can be subsequently recognized using an appropriate classification process. Specifically, a window (520) is slid in a step-wise convolutional-like fashion (5201, 5202, 5203) across a field of preprocessed, specifically uniformly scaled, characters. Each pixel in the window is applied as an input to a positioning neural network (152) that has been trained to produce an output activation whenever a character "heart" is spatially coincident with a pixel position within an array (430) centrally located within the window. As the window is successively moved across the field, in a stepped fashion, the activation outputs of the neural network are averaged, on a weighted basis, for each different window position and separately for each horizontal pixel position in the field. The resulting averaged activation output values, typically in the form of a Gaussian distribution for each character, are then filtered, thresholded and then used, via a weighted average calculation with horizontal pixel positions being used as the weights, to determine the character "heart" position as being the center pixel position in the distribution.
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