A method and apparatus for generating a degraded character image at
various levels of degradation automatically is presented in this
invention. The method comprises rendering the character image on a scene
plane; translating and rotating the scene plane according to various
parameters; determining a projection region of the character image on an
image plane according to various parameters; generating a pixel region
mask; and generating a final degraded image by super-sampling. Thus
various degraded character images are generated on various conditions of
degradation. The generated synthetic characters can be used for
performance evaluation and training data augmentation in optical
character recognition (OCR).