3D Text Recognition and Localization From Point Clouds via 2D Projection and Virtual Camera

Abstract

The lack of training datasets and computational complexity of 3 dimensions make text localization and recognition in point cloud environments challenging tasks, resulting in them being relatively undeveloped topics in the research community. In this paper, we introduce a method to adapt 2D text detection and recognition techniques in panoramic images with appropriate 3D mapping. This combined with heuristic methods such as a virtual camera creates a fast and efficient 3D text localization and recognition system. In real world applications, the objects of interest for a computer vision task may not be captured by the sensor from an ideal perspective; instead skewed imagery or partial occlusions are common. In a virtual 3D environment, we have full control of viewing angles and distances from the object. Therefore, by placing a virtual camera in certain positions, we can generate synthetic imagery of the object that is based on real imagery and avoids skewed views or occlusions. We use this synthetic imagery to improve the performance of text recognition when the object of interest is sufficiently close to the scanner, and hence the point density is high enough to generate quality imagery. The simplistic nature of this system is attractive and computationally inexpensive as it uses 2D data processes instead of natively 3D. The system shows promising results with over 85% accuracy for detection and localization tasks and 80% on the recognition task.