Rotation-invariant features for multi-oriented text detection in natural images.

Texts in natural scenes carry rich semantic information, which can be used to assist a wide range of applications, such as object recognition, image/video retrieval, mapping/navigation, and human computer interaction. However, most existing systems are designed to detect and recognize horizontal (or near-horizontal) texts. Due to the increasing popularity of mobile-computing devices and applications, detecting texts of varying orientations from natural images under less controlled conditions has become an important but challenging task. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to detect texts of varying orientations. Our algorithm is based on a two-level classification scheme and two sets of features specially designed for capturing the intrinsic characteristics of texts. To better evaluate the proposed method and compare it with the competing algorithms, we generate a comprehensive dataset with various types of texts in diverse real-world scenes. We also propose a new evaluation protocol, which is more suitable for benchmarking algorithms for detecting texts in varying orientations. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our system compares favorably with the state-of-the-art algorithms when handling horizontal texts and achieves significantly enhanced performance on variant texts in complex natural scenes

ANN-based Innovative Segmentation Method for Handwritten text in Assamese

Artificial Neural Network (ANN) s has widely been used for recognition of optically scanned character, which partially emulates human thinking in the domain of the Artificial Intelligence. But prior to recognition, it is necessary to segment the character from the text to sentences, words etc. Segmentation of words into individual letters has been one of the major problems in handwriting recognition. Despite several successful works all over the work, development of such tools in specific languages is still an ongoing process especially in the Indian context. This work explores the application of ANN as an aid to segmentation of handwritten characters in Assamese- an important language in the North Eastern part of India. The work explores the performance difference obtained in applying an ANN-based dynamic segmentation algorithm compared to projection- based static segmentation. The algorithm involves, first training of an ANN with individual handwritten characters recorded from different individuals. Handwritten sentences are separated out from text using a static segmentation method. From the segmented line, individual characters are separated out by first over segmenting the entire line. Each of the segments thus obtained, next, is fed to the trained ANN. The point of segmentation at which the ANN recognizes a segment or a combination of several segments to be similar to a handwritten character, a segmentation boundary for the character is assumed to exist and segmentation performed. The segmented character is next compared to the best available match and the segmentation boundary confirmed

STEFANN: Scene Text Editor using Font Adaptive Neural Network

Textual information in a captured scene plays an important role in scene interpretation and decision making. Though there exist methods that can successfully detect and interpret complex text regions present in a scene, to the best of our knowledge, there is no significant prior work that aims to modify the textual information in an image. The ability to edit text directly on images has several advantages including error correction, text restoration and image reusability. In this paper, we propose a method to modify text in an image at character-level. We approach the problem in two stages. At first, the unobserved character (target) is generated from an observed character (source) being modified. We propose two different neural network architectures - (a) FANnet to achieve structural consistency with source font and (b) Colornet to preserve source color. Next, we replace the source character with the generated character maintaining both geometric and visual consistency with neighboring characters. Our method works as a unified platform for modifying text in images. We present the effectiveness of our method on COCO-Text and ICDAR datasets both qualitatively and quantitatively.Comment: Accepted in The IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 202