Character and line extraction from color map images using a multi-layer neural network

A multi-layer neural network based technique is presented in this paper for extracting characters and lines from color geographic map images. In this method, a neural network is first trained with feature values at known character and line pixels and background pixels and then used for image classification. The image segmentation problem is treated as a pattern classification process and the neural network classifier is used to generate non-linear decision regions to separate the foreground and background of an image that may contain a number of non-uniform regions with different colors. The method has been verified to work well with experimental studies. © 1994.