Character recognition in natural images : Testing the accuracy of OCR and potential improvement by image segmentation

Sammanfattning: In recent years, reading text from natural images has gained renewed research attention. One of the main reasons for this is the rapid growth of camera-based applications on smart phones and other portable devices. With the increasing availability of high performance, low-priced, image-capturing devices, the application of scene text recognition is rapidly expanding and becoming increasingly popular. Despite many efforts, character recognition in natural images, is still considered a challenging and unresolved problem. The difficulties stem from the fact that natural images suffer from a wide variety of obstacles such as complex backgrounds, font variation, uneven illumination, resolution problems, occlusions, perspective effects, just to mention a few. This paper aims to test the accuracy of OCR in character recognition of natural images as well as testing the possible improvement in accuracy after implementing three different segmentation methods.The results showed that the accuracy of OCR was very poor and no improvments in accuracy were found after implementing the chosen segmentation methods.