Integrated natural scene text localization and recognition

Abstract

Now days reading words from an unconstrained and noisy image is not easy. Text localization and recognition in an image is a research area which takes efforts to develop a computer system with an ability to automatically read the text from images. The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool gives good results obtained to read the text from an image. The objective of this study is to propose a new method for text localization and recognition in natural scene images with complex background. In this paper, a hybrid methodology is suggested which extracts text from natural scene image with chaotic backgrounds. The proposed approach involves four stages. First, superimposed text regions in an image are extracted based on character descriptors features like Area, Bounding box, Perimeter, Euler number, Horizontal crossings. In the second step, superimposed text regions are tested for text content or nontext using character descriptors and SVM classifier. In the third step, detection of multiple lines in localized text regions is done and line segmentation is performed using horizontal profiles. In the final step, using vertical profiles each character of the segmented line is extracted. The workout has been done using images drawn from ICDAR 2013 and SVT 2010 datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which can be used as an efficient method for text localization and recognition in natural scene images.