Enhanced Characterness for Text Detection in the Wild
This addresses text spotting in wild environments for computer vision applications, but appears incremental as it builds on existing region-based methods.
The paper tackles text detection in natural scenes by proposing a language-agnostic method using edge-enhanced Maximally Stable Extremal Regions with characterness measures to reject non-text regions. The method achieves comparative to better generalization performance than traditional approaches.
Text spotting is an interesting research problem as text may appear at any random place and may occur in various forms. Moreover, ability to detect text opens the horizons for improving many advanced computer vision problems. In this paper, we propose a novel language agnostic text detection method utilizing edge enhanced Maximally Stable Extremal Regions in natural scenes by defining strong characterness measures. We show that a simple combination of characterness cues help in rejecting the non text regions. These regions are further fine-tuned for rejecting the non-textual neighbor regions. Comprehensive evaluation of the proposed scheme shows that it provides comparative to better generalization performance to the traditional methods for this task.