To solve the problem of inaccurate segmentation and low character recognition on the instrument labels of small character spacing by traditional methods

a recognition algorithm is proposed for merged characters through adaptive segmentation and reconstruction. First

we use algorithms

such as median filtering and binarization

for image pre-processing. Second

the morphology filter is used to remove unwanted messages and to increase character spacing. Third

we find the geometric center of each character through centroid algorithm

getting each character bounding by the Sobel edge detection operator

and establish the Region of Interest (ROI)of each character. Then turn to the original image for character segmentation

and add certain pixels wide rectangular spacing bar

which refers to the GB standards to each character after segmentation

and then we reconstruct the image. Finally

we carry on the Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The character recognition experiments for 993 instrument labels with a recognition rate of 95.7%

The algorithm proposed was proved for an effective character recognition method for instrument labels.