Passport Recognition using Fuzzy Binarization and Enhanced Fuzzy RBF Network

Today, an automatic and accurate processing using computer is essential because of the rapid increase of travelers. The determination of forged passports plays an important role in the immigration control system. Hence, as the preprocessing phase for the determination of forged passports, this paper proposes a novel method for the recognition of passports based on the fuzzy binarization and the fuzzy RBF network. First, for the extraction of individual codes for recognizing, this paper targets code sequence blocks including individual codes by applying Sobel masking, horizontal smearing and a contour tracking algorithm on the passport image. Then the proposed method binarizes the extracted blocks using fuzzy binarization based on the trapezoid type membership function. Then, as the last step, individual codes are recovered and extracted from the binarized areas by applying CDM masking and vertical smearing. This paper also proposes an enhanced fuzzy RBF network that adapts the enhanced fuzzy ART network for the middle layer. This network is applied to the recognition of individual codes. The results of the experiments for performance evaluation on the real passport images showed that the proposed method has the better performance compared with other approaches.