CHARACTER RECOGNITION IN NATURAL IMAGES

Teófilo E. de Campos, Bodla Rakesh Babu, Manik Varma

2009

Abstract

This paper tackles the problem of recognizing characters in images of natural scenes. In particular, we focus on recognizing characters in situations that would traditionally not be handled well by OCR techniques. We present an annotated database of images containing English and Kannada characters. The database comprises of images of street scenes taken in Bangalore, India using a standard camera. The problem is addressed in an object cateogorization framework based on a bag-of-visual-words representation. We assess the performance of various features based on nearest neighbour and SVMclassification. It is demonstrated that the performance of the proposed method, using as few as 15 training images, can be far superior to that of commercial OCR systems. Furthermore, the method can benefit from synthetically generated training data obviating the need for expensive data collection and annotation.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

E. de Campos T., Rakesh Babu B. and Varma M. (2009). CHARACTER RECOGNITION IN NATURAL IMAGES . In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2009) ISBN 978-989-8111-69-2, pages 273-280. DOI: 10.5220/0001770102730280

in Bibtex Style

@conference{visapp09,
author={Teófilo E. de Campos and Bodla Rakesh Babu and Manik Varma},
title={CHARACTER RECOGNITION IN NATURAL IMAGES},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2009)},
year={2009},
pages={273-280},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001770102730280},
isbn={978-989-8111-69-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2009)
TI - CHARACTER RECOGNITION IN NATURAL IMAGES
SN - 978-989-8111-69-2
AU - E. de Campos T.
AU - Rakesh Babu B.
AU - Varma M.
PY - 2009
SP - 273
EP - 280
DO - 10.5220/0001770102730280