Classification of Line and Character Pixels on Raster Maps Using Discrete Cosine Transformation Coefficients and Support Vector Machines

Raster maps are widely available on the Internet. Valuable information such as street lines and labels, however, are all hidden in the raster format. To utilize the information, it is important to recognize the line and character pixels for further processing. This paper presents a novel algorithm using 2-D Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) coefficients and Support Vector Machines (SVM) to classify the pixels of lines and characters on raster maps. The experiment results show that our algorithm achieves 98% precision and 85% recall in classifying the line pixels and 83% precision and 96% recall in classifying the character pixels on a variety of raster map sources.