Text Detection and Character Recognition in Scene Images with Unsupervised Feature Learning

—Reading text from photographs is a challenging problem that has received a signicant amount of attention. Two key components of most systems are (i) text detection from images and (ii) character recognition, and many recent methods have been proposed to design better feature representations and models for both. In this paper, we apply methods recently developed in machine learning–specifically, large-scale algorithms for learning the features automatically from unlabeled data–and show that they allow us to construct highly effective classifiers for both detection and recognition to be used in a high accuracy end-to-end system. Keywords-Robust reading, character recognition, feature learning, photo OCR

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICDAR
• Authors: Adam Coates, Blake Carpenter, Carl Case, Sanjeev Satheesh, Bipin Suresh, Tao Wang, David J. Wu, Andrew Y. Ng
• Keywords: Character Recognition, Document Analysis, Feature Representations, ICDAR 2011, Scale Algorithms