Abstract
The characters written on a signboard in a scene image are important information to develop a feature traffic support system and to search the objective image in a large image database. This paper proposes a method to extract the character string on a signboard in a gray-scaled scene image that is taken on the street. The location, size, inclination, vertical or horizontal direction, the number of characters and the type of character font are not fixed in a character string region in a scene image. In the method, the character string region is extracted using the genetic algorithm that evaluates the averaged strength of edges, the size of the region, the distribution of edge directions and the distribution of gray levels surrounding the region. The experimental results show that the character string regions were extracted with reliable recognition rate by the proposed method.
