Text recognition in scene image and video frame using Color Channel selection

In recent years, recognition of text from natural scene image and video frame has got increased attention among the researchers due to its various complexities and challenges. Because of low resolution, blurring effect, complex background, different fonts, color and variant alignment of text within images and video frames, etc., text recognition in such scenario is difficult. Most of the current approaches usually apply a binarization algorithm to convert them into binary images and next OCR is applied to get the recognition result. In this paper, we present a novel approach based on color channel selection for text recognition from scene images and video frames. In the approach, at first, a color channel is automatically selected and then selected color channel is considered for text recognition. Our text recognition framework is based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM) which uses Pyramidal Histogram of Oriented Gradient features extracted from selected color channel. From each sliding window of a color channel our color-channel selection approach analyzes the image properties from the sliding window and then a multi-label Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is applied to select the color channel that will provide the best recognition results in the sliding window. This color channel selection for each sliding window has been found to be more fruitful than considering a single color channel for the whole word image. Five different features have been analyzed for multi-label SVM based color channel selection where wavelet transform based feature outperforms others. Our framework of color channel selection is script-independent. It has been tested in English (Roman) and Devanagari (Indic) scripts. We have tested our approach on English datasets (ICDAR 2003, ICDAR 2013, MSRA-TD500, IIIT5K, SVT, YVT) publicly available for both video and scene images. For Devanagari script, we collected our own dataset. The performances obtained from experimental results are encouraging and show the advantage of the proposed method.