671 research outputs found
COCO_TS Dataset: Pixel-level Annotations Based on Weak Supervision for Scene Text Segmentation
The absence of large scale datasets with pixel-level supervisions is a
significant obstacle for the training of deep convolutional networks for scene
text segmentation. For this reason, synthetic data generation is normally
employed to enlarge the training dataset. Nonetheless, synthetic data cannot
reproduce the complexity and variability of natural images. In this paper, a
weakly supervised learning approach is used to reduce the shift between
training on real and synthetic data. Pixel-level supervisions for a text
detection dataset (i.e. where only bounding-box annotations are available) are
generated. In particular, the COCO-Text-Segmentation (COCO_TS) dataset, which
provides pixel-level supervisions for the COCO-Text dataset, is created and
released. The generated annotations are used to train a deep convolutional
neural network for semantic segmentation. Experiments show that the proposed
dataset can be used instead of synthetic data, allowing us to use only a
fraction of the training samples and significantly improving the performances
DeepOtsu: Document Enhancement and Binarization using Iterative Deep Learning
This paper presents a novel iterative deep learning framework and apply it
for document enhancement and binarization. Unlike the traditional methods which
predict the binary label of each pixel on the input image, we train the neural
network to learn the degradations in document images and produce the uniform
images of the degraded input images, which allows the network to refine the
output iteratively. Two different iterative methods have been studied in this
paper: recurrent refinement (RR) which uses the same trained neural network in
each iteration for document enhancement and stacked refinement (SR) which uses
a stack of different neural networks for iterative output refinement. Given the
learned uniform and enhanced image, the binarization map can be easy to obtain
by a global or local threshold. The experimental results on several public
benchmark data sets show that our proposed methods provide a new clean version
of the degraded image which is suitable for visualization and promising results
of binarization using the global Otsu's threshold based on the enhanced images
learned iteratively by the neural network.Comment: Accepted by Pattern Recognitio
Enhancing Energy Minimization Framework for Scene Text Recognition with Top-Down Cues
Recognizing scene text is a challenging problem, even more so than the
recognition of scanned documents. This problem has gained significant attention
from the computer vision community in recent years, and several methods based
on energy minimization frameworks and deep learning approaches have been
proposed. In this work, we focus on the energy minimization framework and
propose a model that exploits both bottom-up and top-down cues for recognizing
cropped words extracted from street images. The bottom-up cues are derived from
individual character detections from an image. We build a conditional random
field model on these detections to jointly model the strength of the detections
and the interactions between them. These interactions are top-down cues
obtained from a lexicon-based prior, i.e., language statistics. The optimal
word represented by the text image is obtained by minimizing the energy
function corresponding to the random field model. We evaluate our proposed
algorithm extensively on a number of cropped scene text benchmark datasets,
namely Street View Text, ICDAR 2003, 2011 and 2013 datasets, and IIIT 5K-word,
and show better performance than comparable methods. We perform a rigorous
analysis of all the steps in our approach and analyze the results. We also show
that state-of-the-art convolutional neural network features can be integrated
in our framework to further improve the recognition performance
Word Searching in Scene Image and Video Frame in Multi-Script Scenario using Dynamic Shape Coding
Retrieval of text information from natural scene images and video frames is a
challenging task due to its inherent problems like complex character shapes,
low resolution, background noise, etc. Available OCR systems often fail to
retrieve such information in scene/video frames. Keyword spotting, an
alternative way to retrieve information, performs efficient text searching in
such scenarios. However, current word spotting techniques in scene/video images
are script-specific and they are mainly developed for Latin script. This paper
presents a novel word spotting framework using dynamic shape coding for text
retrieval in natural scene image and video frames. The framework is designed to
search query keyword from multiple scripts with the help of on-the-fly
script-wise keyword generation for the corresponding script. We have used a
two-stage word spotting approach using Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to detect the
translated keyword in a given text line by identifying the script of the line.
A novel unsupervised dynamic shape coding based scheme has been used to group
similar shape characters to avoid confusion and to improve text alignment.
Next, the hypotheses locations are verified to improve retrieval performance.
To evaluate the proposed system for searching keyword from natural scene image
and video frames, we have considered two popular Indic scripts such as Bangla
(Bengali) and Devanagari along with English. Inspired by the zone-wise
recognition approach in Indic scripts[1], zone-wise text information has been
used to improve the traditional word spotting performance in Indic scripts. For
our experiment, a dataset consisting of images of different scenes and video
frames of English, Bangla and Devanagari scripts were considered. The results
obtained showed the effectiveness of our proposed word spotting approach.Comment: Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springe
An Examination of Character Recognition on ID card using Template Matching Approach
AbstractIdentification card (ID cards) becomes the main reference in obtaining information of a citizen. Some business sectors require the information contained in the ID card to perform the registration process. In general, the registration process is still using a form to be filled in accordance with the data on the ID card, which will then be converted into digital data by means of retyping the information. The purpose of this research is to create a character recognition system on the ID card where the character recognition process included into four stages: pre-processing, text-area extraction, segmentation and recognition. The experiment includes some tests of greyscale, binarization and segmentation algorithm, as well as the combination of those algorithms. Text area extractor showed satisfactory results of identifying text-area on the ID card, which can scope all the entire area that consist of text. In the segmentation stage, approximately 93% of character can be cut off correctly. The actual character will be mapped to the template character using two algorithms where the division grid of each of them is different. Nevertheless, the recognition process of applying the template method matching still needs to be improved back
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