A Unified Framework for Multioriented Text Detection and Recognition

Abstract

High level semantics embodied in scene texts are both rich and clear and thus can serve as important cues for a wide range of vision applications, for instance, image understanding, image indexing, video search, geolocation, and automatic navigation. In this paper, we present a unified framework for text detection and recognition in natural images. The contributions of this paper are threefold: 1) text detection and recognition are accomplished concurrently using exactly the same features and classification scheme; 2) in contrast to methods in the literature, which mainly focus on horizontal or near-horizontal texts, the proposed system is capable of localizing and reading texts of varying orientations; and 3) a new dictionary search method is proposed, to correct the recognition errors usually caused by confusions among similar yet different characters. As an additional contribution, a novel image database with texts of different scales, colors, fonts, and orientations in diverse real-world scenarios, is generated and released. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks as well as the proposed database demonstrate that the proposed system achieves highly competitive performance, especially on multioriented texts.