Authors: Xu-Cheng Yin,Xuwang Yin,Kaizhu Huang,Hong-Wei Hao
ArXiv: 1301.2628
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Abstract URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2628v3
Text detection in natural scene images is an important prerequisite for many
content-based image analysis tasks. In this paper, we propose an accurate and
robust method for detecting texts in natural scene images. A fast and effective
pruning algorithm is designed to extract Maximally Stable Extremal Regions
(MSERs) as character candidates using the strategy of minimizing regularized
variations. Character candidates are grouped into text candidates by the
ingle-link clustering algorithm, where distance weights and threshold of the
clustering algorithm are learned automatically by a novel self-training
distance metric learning algorithm. The posterior probabilities of text
candidates corresponding to non-text are estimated with an character
classifier; text candidates with high probabilities are then eliminated and
finally texts are identified with a text classifier. The proposed system is
evaluated on the ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition dataset; the f measure
is over 76% and is significantly better than the state-of-the-art performance
of 71%. Experimental results on a publicly available multilingual dataset also
show that our proposed method can outperform the other competitive method with
the f measure increase of over 9 percent. Finally, we have setup an online demo
of our proposed scene text detection system at
http://kems.ustb.edu.cn/learning/yin/dtext.