Artificial neural networks and fuzzy logic for recognizing alphabet characters and mathematical symbols

Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) are important tools for obtaining accessible texts. We propose the use of artificial neural networks (ANN) in order to develop pattern recognition algorithms capable of recognizing both normal texts and formulae. We present an original improvement of the backpropagation algorithm. Moreover, we describe a novel image segmentation algorithm that exploits fuzzy logic for separating touching characters.