Efficient Scene Text Localization and Recognition with Local Character Refinement

An unconstrained end-to-end text localization and recognition method is presented. The method detects initial text hypothesis in a single pass by an efficient region-based method and subsequently refines the text hypothesis using a more robust local text model, which deviates from the common assumption of region-based methods that all characters are detected as connected components. Additionally, a novel feature based on character stroke area estimation is introduced. The feature is efficiently computed from a region distance map, it is invariant to scaling and rotations and allows to efficiently detect text regions regardless of what portion of text they capture. The method runs in real time and achieves state-of-the-art text localization and recognition results on the ICDAR 2013 Robust Reading dataset

Object Proposals for Text Extraction in the Wild

Object Proposals is a recent computer vision technique receiving increasing interest from the research community. Its main objective is to generate a relatively small set of bounding box proposals that are most likely to contain objects of interest. The use of Object Proposals techniques in the scene text understanding field is innovative. Motivated by the success of powerful while expensive techniques to recognize words in a holistic way, Object Proposals techniques emerge as an alternative to the traditional text detectors. In this paper we study to what extent the existing generic Object Proposals methods may be useful for scene text understanding. Also, we propose a new Object Proposals algorithm that is specifically designed for text and compare it with other generic methods in the state of the art. Experiments show that our proposal is superior in its ability of producing good quality word proposals in an efficient way. The source code of our method is made publicly available.Comment: 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2015