The problem of detecting and recognizing text in natural scenes has proved to be more challenging than its counterpart in documents, with most of the previous work focusing on a single part of the problem. In this work, we propose new solutions to the character and word recognition problems and then show how to combine these solutions in an end-to-end text-recognition system. We do so by leveraging the recently introduced Maxout networks along with hybrid HMM models that have proven useful for voice recognition. Using these elements, we build a tunable and highly accurate recognition system that beats state-of-the-art results on all the sub-problems for both the ICDAR 2003 and SVT benchmark datasets.
@cite_30: 
@cite_33: 
@cite_7: Full end-to-end text recognition in natural images is a challenging problem that has received much attention recently. Traditional systems in this area have relied on elaborate models incorporating carefully hand-engineered features or large amounts of prior knowledge. In this paper, we take a different route and combine the representational power of large, multilayer neural networks together with recent developments in unsupervised feature learning, which allows us to use a common framework to train highly-accurate text detector and character recognizer modules. Then, using only simple off-the-shelf methods, we integrate these two modules into a full end-to-end, lexicon-driven, scene text recognition system that achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, namely Street View Text and ICDAR 2003.
@cite_28: In this paper, we present a text detection and localization method. Our detection technique is based on a cascade of boosted ensemble and localizer uses standard image processing techniques. We propose a small set of features (39 in total) capable of detecting various type of text in grey level natural scene images. Two weak learners, linear discriminant function and log likelihood-ratio test under gaussian assumption, are evaluated. Single features and combination of features are used to form weak classifiers. The proposed scheme is evaluated on ICDAR 2003 robust reading and text locating database. The results are encouraging and the detector can process an images of 640 times 480 pixels in less than 2 seconds.
@cite_32: We present a novel image operator that seeks to find the value of stroke width for each image pixel, and demonstrate its use on the task of text detection in natural images. The suggested operator is local and data dependent, which makes it fast and robust enough to eliminate the need for multi-scale computation or scanning windows. Extensive testing shows that the suggested scheme outperforms the latest published algorithms. Its simplicity allows the algorithm to detect texts in many fonts and languages.
@cite_19: Reading text from photographs is a challenging problem that has received a significant amount of attention. Two key components of most systems are (i) text detection from images and (ii) character recognition, and many recent methods have been proposed to design better feature representations and models for both. In this paper, we apply methods recently developed in machine learning -- specifically, large-scale algorithms for learning the features automatically from unlabeled data -- and show that they allow us to construct highly effective classifiers for both detection and recognition to be used in a high accuracy end-to-end system.
@cite_5: This paper focuses on the problem of word detection and recognition in natural images. The problem is significantly more challenging than reading text in scanned documents, and has only recently gained attention from the computer vision community. Sub-components of the problem, such as text detection and cropped image word recognition, have been studied in isolation [7, 4, 20]. However, what is unclear is how these recent approaches contribute to solving the end-to-end problem of word recognition. We fill this gap by constructing and evaluating two systems. The first, representing the de facto state-of-the-art, is a two stage pipeline consisting of text detection followed by a leading OCR engine. The second is a system rooted in generic object recognition, an extension of our previous work in [20]. We show that the latter approach achieves superior performance. While scene text recognition has generally been treated with highly domain-specific methods, our results demonstrate the suitability of applying generic computer vision methods. Adopting this approach opens the door for real world scene text recognition to benefit from the rapid advances that have been taking place in object recognition.
@cite_31: A general method for text localization and recognition in real-world images is presented. The proposed method is novel, as it (i) departs from a strict feed-forward pipeline and replaces it by a hypothesesverification framework simultaneously processing multiple text line hypotheses, (ii) uses synthetic fonts to train the algorithm eliminating the need for time-consuming acquisition and labeling of real-world training data and (iii) exploits Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSERs) which provides robustness to geometric and illumination conditions. The performance of the method is evaluated on two standard datasets. On the Char74k dataset, a recognition rate of 72 is achieved, 18 higher than the state-of-the-art. The paper is first to report both text detection and recognition results on the standard and rather challenging ICDAR 2003 dataset. The text localization works for number of alphabets and the method is easily adapted to recognition of other scripts, e.g. cyrillics.
@cite_11: 
The text detection problem is defined such that, given a natural image, the goal is to output bounding boxes on all words in the image. Abstractly speaking, the problem is an instance of the object detection problem, followed by segmenting text regions into their constituent words. Previous works investigated different approaches for text detection, typically trading off precision, recall, training time and time consumed for manually designing features. Pre-trained CNNs @cite_19 @cite_7 applied in a multi-scale sliding window fashion are highly accurate but very time consuming. Viola-Jones style classifiers remedy the slowness in CNNs, but have long training times and require manually-engineered features @cite_28 @cite_33 . Alternative methods that cleverly exploit the nature of text such as Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSERs) @cite_11 and Stroke Width Transform @cite_32 generally have lower accuracy but are fast to compute. Such methods were used successfully to detect text as in @cite_31 @cite_30 @cite_5 .