Word Spotting in Bangla and English Graphical Documents

Abstract

Word spotting in graphical documents is a very challenging task. With an increase usage of electronic media, we are in a need of searching objects in graphical documents by some labeled text. To address such scenarios we propose a word spotting system dedicated to graphical documents with Bangla and English scripts. In our proposed system, first text-graphics layers are separated using Gabor filter. In the text layer, character segmentation approach is applied using water reservoir based method to extract each character from the document. Then recognition of these isolated characters is done using rotation invariant feature, coupled with SVM classifier. Well recognized characters are then grouped based on their sizes. Initial spotting is started to find a query word among those groups of characters. In case if the system could spot a word partially due to any noise, SIFT is applied to identify missing portion of that partial spotting. Experimental results on English and Bangla script document images show that the method is feasible to spot a location in text labeled graphical documents.