Enhanced Characterness for Text Detection in the Wild

Text spotting is an interesting research problem as text may appear at any random place and may occur in various forms. Moreover, ability to detect text opens the horizons for improving many advanced computer vision problems. In this paper, we propose a novel language agnostic text detection method utilizing edge enhanced Maximally Stable Extremal Regions in natural scenes by defining strong characterness measures. We show that a simple combination of characterness cues help in rejecting the non text regions. These regions are further fine-tuned for rejecting the non-textual neighbor regions. Comprehensive evaluation of the proposed scheme shows that it provides comparative to better generalization performance to the traditional methods for this task

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

Text localization and recognition in natural scene images

Text localization and recognition (text spotting) in natural scene images is an interesting task that finds many practical applications. Algorithms for text spotting may be used in helping visually impaired subjects during navigation in unknown environments; building autonomous driving systems that automatically avoid collisions with pedestrians or automatically identify speed limits and warn the driver about possible infractions that are being committed; and to ease or solve some tedious and repetitive data entry tasks that are still manually carried out by humans. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) from scanned documents is a solved problem, the same cannot be said for text spotting in natural images. In fact, this latest class of images contains plenty of difficult situations that algorithms for text spotting need to deal with in order to reach acceptable recognition rates. During my PhD research I focused my studies on the development of novel systems for text localization and recognition in natural scene images. The two main works that I have presented during these three years of PhD studies are presented in this thesis: (i) in my first work I propose a hybrid system which exploits the key ideas of region-based and connected components (CC)-based text localization approaches to localize uncommon fonts and writings in natural images; (ii) in my second work I describe a novel deep-based system which exploits Convolutional Neural Networks and enhanced stable CC to achieve good text spotting results on challenging data sets. During the development of both these methods, my focus has always been on maintaining an acceptable computational complexity and a high reproducibility of the achieved results

Text localization and recognition in natural scene images

Text localization and recognition (text spotting) in natural scene images is an interesting task that finds many practical applications. Algorithms for text spotting may be used in helping visually impaired subjects during navigation in unknown environments; building autonomous driving systems that automatically avoid collisions with pedestrians or automatically identify speed limits and warn the driver about possible infractions that are being committed; and to ease or solve some tedious and repetitive data entry tasks that are still manually carried out by humans. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) from scanned documents is a solved problem, the same cannot be said for text spotting in natural images. In fact, this latest class of images contains plenty of difficult situations that algorithms for text spotting need to deal with in order to reach acceptable recognition rates. During my PhD research I focused my studies on the development of novel systems for text localization and recognition in natural scene images. The two main works that I have presented during these three years of PhD studies are presented in this thesis: (i) in my first work I propose a hybrid system which exploits the key ideas of region-based and connected components (CC)-based text localization approaches to localize uncommon fonts and writings in natural images; (ii) in my second work I describe a novel deep-based system which exploits Convolutional Neural Networks and enhanced stable CC to achieve good text spotting results on challenging data sets. During the development of both these methods, my focus has always been on maintaining an acceptable computational complexity and a high reproducibility of the achieved results