초록
This paper presents an algorithm to separate vowels from consonants in Korean characters captured in noisy environment andto recognize them. The algorithm has been originally developed for recognition of the usage code (which is represented by a single Korean character) in the license plates of Korean vehicles. It, however, could be easily adopted to other applications with minor changes, in which character recognition is needed and the environment is noisy. The key ideas of the algorithm are to localize the vowels utilizing Hough transformation and to separate the vowels from consonants utilizing mathematical morphology. We observed that the presented algorithm effectively separates vowels even if the vowels and consonants are joined together after thresholding. We also observed that our algorithm outperforms some conventional algorithms especially when the input images are noisy. The details of the comparison study are presented in the paper.