Word Spotting in the Wild

We present a method for spotting words in the wild, i.e., in real images taken in unconstrained environments. Text found in the wild has a surprising range of difficulty. At one end of the spectrum, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applied to scanned pages of well formatted printed text is one of the most successful applications of computer vision to date. At the other extreme lie visual CAPTCHAs – text that is constructed explicitly to fool computer vision algorithms. Both tasks involve recognizing text, yet one is nearly solved while the other remains extremely challenging. In this work, we argue that the appearance of words in the wild spans this range of difficulties and propose a new word recognition approach based on state-of-the-art methods from generic object recognition, in which we consider object categories to be the words themselves. We compare performance of leading OCR engines – one open source and one proprietary – with our new approach on the ICDAR Robust Readi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ECCV
• Keywords: Computer Vision, Data Sets, ECCV 2010, Optical Character Recognition, Word Recognition Approach