| abstract |
Circumnavigation using an increased test cell domain may be used to collect data from discontinuous characters stored in a bit map such as those printed by a dot matrix printer. The test cell domain is increased to locate a pixel and consider it a portion of the same character if it is within the minimum permissable pixel gap range. The sequence of testing must be designed to read each possible pixel and not enter an endless loop during the circumnavigation. One sequence of testing is to begin testing those cells in the column adjacent to the reference cell beginning of the cell in the row adjacent to the reference cell and testing cells adjacent to the most recently tested cell along the entire column until the desired number of cells in that column according to the minimum permissable pixel gap range have been tested. Each column adjacent to the most recently tested is tested in the described sequence until the desired number of columns have been tested to permit the minimum permissable gap spacing. The last set of cells tested are in the same row as the reference cell beginning at the cell adjacent to the reference cell and testing each cell adjacent to the most recently read cell. This is a method by which discontinuous text such as dot matrix print or poor quality print may be recognized. An apparatus for carrying out the method of this invention includes an optical scanner, memory, template reference characters and an output device to provide the ASCII code of the recognized sample character. |