Text Region Extraction and OCR on Camera Based Images

Abstract

Traditional OCR engines are designed to the scanned documents in calibrated environment. Three dimensional perspective distortion and smooth distortion in images are critical problems caused by un-calibrated devices, e.g. image from smart phones. To meetthe growing demand of character recognition of texts embedded in the photos acquired from the non-calibrated hand-held devices, we address the problem in three categorical aspects: rotational invariant method of text region extraction, scale invariant method of text line segmentation, and three dimensional perspective mapping. With the integration of the methods, we developed an OCR for camera-captured images.