Recognition of the Passport by Using Fuzzy Binarization and Enhanced Fuzzy Neural Networks

The judgment of forged passports plays an important role in the immigration control system, for which the automatic and accurate processing is required because of the rapid increase of travelers. So, as the preprocessing phase for the judgment of forged passports, this paper proposed the novel method for the recognition of passport based on the fuzzy binarization and the fuzzy RBF neural network newly proposed. first, for the extraction of individual codes being recognized, the paper extracts code sequence blocks including individual codes by applying the Sobel masking, the horizontal smearing and the contour tracking algorithm in turn to the passport image, binarizes the extracted blocks by using the fuzzy binarization based on the membership function of trapezoid type, and, as the last step, recovers and extracts individual codes from the binarized areas by applying the CDM masking and the vertical smearing. Next, the paper proposed the enhanced fuzzy RBF neural network that adapts the enhanced fuzzy ART network to the middle layer and applied to the recognition of individual codes. The results of the experiment for performance evaluation on the real passport images showed that the proposed method in the paper has the improved performance in the recognition of passport.