中国科学院自动化研究所机构知识库

In this paper, a novel binarization technique is introduced for natural scene text, which can be applied after the text location step in order to improve OCR recognition. At the first step, an “optimum” conversion from color image to grayscale im- age is performed by minimizing L1 − N orm distance between original color image and reconstructed image on correspond- ing optimum projection vector. Based on it, at the second step, an approach is developed to classify scene text into two categories: “simple” and “complex”, for the purpose of opti- mizing the processing speed and preserving performance. At the last step, binarization is performed with different methods for “simple” and “complex” scene text. Results on word im- ages from the challenging ICDAR 2003 dataset show that our scheme can gain higher performance compared with state-of- the-art methods in OCR accuracy.