Figure-ground discrimination and distortion-tolerant recognition of color characters in scene images

This paper proposes a new technique of figureground discrimination of color characters in scene images following two steps. The first step is temporary binarization by selecting one optimal projection axis in the RGB color space and a threshold value along the axis using Otsu’s criterion as a two-class classification problem. The second step is figureground determination based on the figure-to-ground ratio on the image periphery and common characteristics that a character pattern should have. Next, regarding distortion-tolerant character recognition under the condition of a small sample size we compare our global affine transformation (GAT) correlation method against the well-known tangent distance, where both methods use only a single template for each of 62 alphanumeric characters. Experiments are made on a total of 698 character images extracted from the ICDAR 2003 robust OCR dataset. The proposed figure-ground discrimination method achieves a correct binarization rate of 75.3%. ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICPR
• Authors: Toru Wakahara
• Keywords: Computer Vision, Correlation Method, GAT Correlation Method, ICPR 2008, Tangent Distance