Optimized OCR black/white pixel algorithm

Question

I am writing a simple OCR solution for a finite set of characters. That is, I know the exact way all 26 letters in the alphabet will look like. I am using C# and am able to easi

Answer 1

I don't have an answer, but here are some bounds on your eventual solution:

If you want a straight up "use X pixels as a key" then you'll need at least ceiling(log2(number of characters)) pixels. You won't be able to disambiguate letters with less bits. In your case, trying to find the 5 pixels is equivalent to finding 5 pixels that split the letters into independent partitions. It probably isn't that easy.

You can also use Moron's (heheh) suggestion and build a tree based on the letter frequencies of the language you are scanning similar to Huffman coding. That would take up more space than 5-bits per letter, but would probably be smaller assuming a power-law distribution of letter usage. I would go with this approach as it allows you to search for a specific partition for each node rather than searching for a set of partitions.