A Study on Automation about Painting the Letters to Road Surface

In this study, the researchers attempted to automate the process of painting the characters on the road surface, which is currently done by manual labor, by using the information and communication technology. Here are the descriptions of how we put in our efforts to achieve such a goal. First, we familiarized ourselves with the current regulations about painting letters or characters on the road, with reference to Road Mark Installation Management Manual of the National Police Agency. Regarding the graphemes, we adopted a new one using connection components, in Gothic print characters which was within the range of acceptance according to the aforementioned manual. We also made it possible for the automated program to recognize the graphemes by means of the feature dots of the isolated dots, end dots, 2-line gathering dots, and gathering dots of 3 lines or more. Regarding the database, we built graphemes database for plotting information, classified the characters by means of the arrangement information of the graphemes and the layers that the graphemes form within the characters, and last but not least, made the character shape information database for character plotting by using such data. We measured the layers and the arrangement information of the graphemes consisting the characters by using the information of: 1) the information of the position of the center of gravity, and 2) the information of the graphemes that was acquired through vertical exploration from the center of gravity in each grapheme. We identified and compared the group to which each character of the database belonged, and recognized the characters through the use of the information gathered using this method. We analyzed the input characters using the aforementioned analysis method and database, and then converted into plotting information. It was shown that the plotting was performed after the correction.