365 research outputs found

    Local Binarization for Document Images Captured by Cameras with Decision Tree

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    Character recognition in a document image captured by a digital camera requires a good binary image as the input for the separation the text from the background. Global binarization method does not provide such good separation because of the problem of uneven levels of lighting in images captured by cameras. Local binarization method overcomes the problem but requires a method to partition the large image into local windows properly. In this paper, we propose a local binariation method with dynamic image partitioning using integral image and decision tree for the binarization decision. The integral image is used to estimate the number of line in the document image. The number of line in the document image is used to devide the document into local windows. The decision tree makes a decision for threshold in every local window. The result shows that the proposed method can separate the text from the background better than using global thresholding with the best OCR result of the binarized image is 99.4%. Pengenalan karakter pada sebuah dokumen citra yang diambil menggunakan kamera digital membutuhkan citra yang terbinerisasi dengan baik untuk memisahkan antara teks dengan background. Metode binarisasi global tidak memberikan hasil pemisahan yang bagus karena permasalahan tingkat pencahayaan yang tidak seimbang pada citra hasil kamera digital. Metode binarisasi lokal dapat mengatasi permasalahan tersebut namun metode tersebut membutuhkan metode untuk membagi citra ke dalam bagian-bagian window lokal. Pada paper ini diusulkan sebuah metode binarisasi lokal dengan pembagian citra secara dinamis menggunakan integral image dan decision tree untuk keputusan binarisasi lokalnya. Integral image digunakan untuk mengestimasi jumlah baris teks dalam dokumen citra. Jumlah baris tersebut kemudian digunakan untuk membagi citra dokumen ke dalam window lokal. Keputusan nilai threshold untuk setiap window lokal ditentukan dengan decisiontree. Hasilnya menunjukkan metode yang diusulkan dapat memisahkan teks dari dokumen citra lebih baik dari binarisasi global dengan tingkat pengenalan OCR hingga 99.4%

    New Thresholding Methods for Unimodal Images of Food and Agricultural Products

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    Global thresholding methods fail to segment poor contrast unimodal food and agricultural images. Many local adaptive thresholding and multi-level thresholding methods are reported in image processing journals, but there are limited studies extending them to food and agricultural images. This article presents development of Reverse Water Flow, a new local adaptive thresholding method, and Twice Otsu, a new multi-level thresholding method, to segment food and agricultural images. Reverse Water Flow method was well suited for identification of smaller objects such as 2 mm diameter holes. It reduced computational time by 61.1% compared to the previous best method. Twice Otsu method was well suited to identify larger objects. Both thresholding methods successfully segmented food and agricultural images from different imaging sources and should be extendable to other unimodal and poor contrast images. The developed methods may also facilitate further development of segmentation methods for food and agricultural applications

    A Robust Algorithm for Emoji Detection in Smartphone Screenshot Images

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    The increasing use of smartphones and social media apps for communication results in a massive number of screenshot images. These images enrich the written language through text and emojis. In this regard, several studies in the image analysis field have considered text. However, they ignored the use of emojis. In this study, a robust two-stage algorithm for detecting emojis in screenshot images is proposed. The first stage localizes the regions of candidate emojis by using the proposed RGB-channel analysis method followed by a connected component method with a set of proposed rules. In the second verification stage, each of the emojis and non-emojis are classified by using proposed features with a decision tree classifier. Experiments were conducted to evaluate each stage independently and assess the performance of the proposed algorithm completely by using a self-collected dataset. The results showed that the proposed RGB-channel analysis method achieved better performance than the Niblack and Sauvola methods. Moreover, the proposed feature extraction method with decision tree classifier achieved more satisfactory performance than the LBP feature extraction method with all Bayesian network, perceptron neural network, and decision table rules. Overall, the proposed algorithm exhibited high efficiency in detecting emojis in screenshot images

    Text Detection in Natural Scenes and Technical Diagrams with Convolutional Feature Learning and Cascaded Classification

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    An enormous amount of digital images are being generated and stored every day. Understanding text in these images is an important challenge with large impacts for academic, industrial and domestic applications. Recent studies address the difficulty of separating text targets from noise and background, all of which vary greatly in natural scenes. To tackle this problem, we develop a text detection system to analyze and utilize visual information in a data driven, automatic and intelligent way. The proposed method incorporates features learned from data, including patch-based coarse-to-fine detection (Text-Conv), connected component extraction using region growing, and graph-based word segmentation (Word-Graph). Text-Conv is a sliding window-based detector, with convolution masks learned using the Convolutional k-means algorithm (Coates et. al, 2011). Unlike convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a single vector/layer of convolution mask responses are used to classify patches. An initial coarse detection considers both local and neighboring patch responses, followed by refinement using varying aspect ratios and rotations for a smaller local detection window. Different levels of visual detail from ground truth are utilized in each step, first using constraints on bounding box intersections, and then a combination of bounding box and pixel intersections. Combining masks from different Convolutional k-means initializations, e.g., seeded using random vectors and then support vectors improves performance. The Word-Graph algorithm uses contextual information to improve word segmentation and prune false character detections based on visual features and spatial context. Our system obtains pixel, character, and word detection f-measures of 93.14%, 90.26%, and 86.77% respectively for the ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading Focused Scene Text dataset, out-performing state-of-the-art systems, and producing highly accurate text detection masks at the pixel level. To investigate the utility of our feature learning approach for other image types, we perform tests on 8- bit greyscale USPTO patent drawing diagram images. An ensemble of Ada-Boost classifiers with different convolutional features (MetaBoost) is used to classify patches as text or background. The Tesseract OCR system is used to recognize characters in detected labels and enhance performance. With appropriate pre-processing and post-processing, f-measures of 82% for part label location, and 73% for valid part label locations and strings are obtained, which are the best obtained to-date for the USPTO patent diagram data set used in our experiments. To sum up, an intelligent refinement of convolutional k-means-based feature learning and novel automatic classification methods are proposed for text detection, which obtain state-of-the-art results without the need for strong prior knowledge. Different ground truth representations along with features including edges, color, shape and spatial relationships are used coherently to improve accuracy. Different variations of feature learning are explored, e.g. support vector-seeded clustering and MetaBoost, with results suggesting that increased diversity in learned features benefit convolution-based text detectors

    U-Net-bin: hacking the document image binarization contest

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    Image binarization is still a challenging task in a variety of applications. In particular, Document Image Binarization Contest (DIBCO) is organized regularly to track the state-of-the-art techniques for the historical document binarization. In this work we present a binarization method that was ranked first in the DIBCO`17 contest. It is a convolutional neural network (CNN) based method which uses U-Net architecture, originally designed for biomedical image segmentation. We describe our approach to training data preparation and contest ground truth examination and provide multiple insights on its construction (so called hacking). It led to more accurate historical document binarization problem statement with respect to the challenges one could face in the open access datasets. A docker container with the final network along with all the supplementary data we used in the training process has been published on Github.The work was partially funded by Russian Foundation for Basic Research (projects 17-29-07092 and 17-29-07093)

    Digits Recognition on Medical Device

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    With the rapid development of mobile health, mechanisms for automatic data input are becoming increasingly important for mobile health apps. In these apps, users are often required to input data frequently, especially numbers, from medical devices such as glucometers and blood pressure meters. However, these simple tasks are tedious and prone to error. Even though some Bluetooth devices can make those input operations easier, they are not popular enough due to being expensive and requiring complicated protocol support. Therefore, we propose an automatic procedure to recognize the digits on the screen of medical devices with smartphone cameras. The whole procedure includes several “standard” components in computer vision: image enhancement, the region-of-interest detection, and text recognition. Previous works existed for each component, but they have various weaknesses that lead to a low recognition rate. We proposed several novel enhancements in each component. Experiment results suggest that our enhanced procedure outperforms the procedure of applying optical character recognition directly from 6.2% to 62.1%. This procedure can be adopted (with human verification) to recognize the digits on the screen of medical devices with smartphone cameras

    Character Recognition

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    Character recognition is one of the pattern recognition technologies that are most widely used in practical applications. This book presents recent advances that are relevant to character recognition, from technical topics such as image processing, feature extraction or classification, to new applications including human-computer interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide a reference source for academic research and for professionals working in the character recognition field

    Adaptive Methods for Robust Document Image Understanding

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    A vast amount of digital document material is continuously being produced as part of major digitization efforts around the world. In this context, generic and efficient automatic solutions for document image understanding represent a stringent necessity. We propose a generic framework for document image understanding systems, usable for practically any document types available in digital form. Following the introduced workflow, we shift our attention to each of the following processing stages in turn: quality assurance, image enhancement, color reduction and binarization, skew and orientation detection, page segmentation and logical layout analysis. We review the state of the art in each area, identify current defficiencies, point out promising directions and give specific guidelines for future investigation. We address some of the identified issues by means of novel algorithmic solutions putting special focus on generality, computational efficiency and the exploitation of all available sources of information. More specifically, we introduce the following original methods: a fully automatic detection of color reference targets in digitized material, accurate foreground extraction from color historical documents, font enhancement for hot metal typesetted prints, a theoretically optimal solution for the document binarization problem from both computational complexity- and threshold selection point of view, a layout-independent skew and orientation detection, a robust and versatile page segmentation method, a semi-automatic front page detection algorithm and a complete framework for article segmentation in periodical publications. The proposed methods are experimentally evaluated on large datasets consisting of real-life heterogeneous document scans. The obtained results show that a document understanding system combining these modules is able to robustly process a wide variety of documents with good overall accuracy
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