抄録
Recognizing characters on signboards in a scene would be very useful for translation, aquiring relevant information through the Internet, etc. This paper presents a method for extracting characters on signboards in arbitrary scene images that does not require any manual operations. First, we describe briefly the framework of an information handling system driven by characters on signboards in scene images. Next, a method for detecting signboard regions and individual character regions is investigated in consideration of signboards characteristics. The proposed method for detecting signboard regions is based on hierarchical clustering in the L* a* b* color space. Features of contour shape are examined to narrow the candidates of signboard regions. In addition, merging of adjacent candidate regions and rough checking of character existence are performed. Finally, each character on the signboard region is extracted by using binarization followed by horizontal and vertical projections. Experimental results from applying the method to 1000 various scene images show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
