A Holistic Method to Recognize Characters in Natural Scenes

Muhammad Ali, Hassan Foroosh

2016

Abstract

Local features like Histogram of Gradients (HoG), Shape Contexts (SC) etc. are normally used by research community concerned with text recognition in natural scene images. The main issue that comes with this approach is ad hoc rasterization of feature vector which can disturb global structural and spatial correlations while constructing feature vector. Moreover, such approaches, in general, don’t take into account rotational invariance property that often leads to failed recognition in cases where characters occur in rotated positions in scene images. To address local feature dependency and rotation problems, we propose a novel holistic feature based on active contour model, aka snakes. Our feature vector is based on two variables, direction and distance, cumulatively traversed by each point as the initial circular contour evolves under the force field induced by the image. The initial contour design in conjunction with cross-correlation based similarity metric enables us to account for rotational variance in the character image. We use various datasets, including synthetic and natural scene character datasets, like Chars74K-Font, Chars74K-Image, and ICDAR2003 to compare results of our approach with several baseline methods and show better performance than methods based on local features (e.g. HoG). Our leave-random-one-out-cross validation yields even better recognition performance, justifying our approach of using holistic character recognition.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Ali M. and Foroosh H. (2016). A Holistic Method to Recognize Characters in Natural Scenes . In Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 4: VISAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2016) ISBN 978-989-758-175-5, pages 449-457. DOI: 10.5220/0005787904490457

in Bibtex Style

@conference{visapp16,
author={Muhammad Ali and Hassan Foroosh},
title={A Holistic Method to Recognize Characters in Natural Scenes},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 4: VISAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2016)},
year={2016},
pages={449-457},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005787904490457},
isbn={978-989-758-175-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 4: VISAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2016)
TI - A Holistic Method to Recognize Characters in Natural Scenes
SN - 978-989-758-175-5
AU - Ali M.
AU - Foroosh H.
PY - 2016
SP - 449
EP - 457
DO - 10.5220/0005787904490457