Data extraction from engraved text is discussed rarely, and nothing in the open literature discusses data extraction from cemetery headstones. Headstone images present unique challenges such as engraved or embossed characters (causing inner-character shadows), low contrast with the background, and significant noise due to inconsistent stone texture and weathering. Current systems for extracting text from outdoor environments (billboards, signs, etc.) make assumptions (i.e. clean and/or consistently-textured background and text) that fail when applied to the domain of engraved text. Additionally, the ability to extract the data found on headstones is of great historical value. This thesis describes a novel and efficient feature-based text zoning and segmentation method for the extraction of noisy text from a highly textured engraved medium. Additionally, the usefulness of constraining a problem to a specific domain is demonstrated. The transcriptions of images zoned and segmented through the proposed system result in a precision of 55% compared to 1% precision without zoning, a 62% recall compared to 39%, an F-measure of 58% compared to 2%, and an error rate of 77% compared to 8303%.

Textual information within digital media can be used in many areas such as, indexing and structuring of media databases, in the aid of visually impaired, translation of foreign signs and many more. This said, mainly text can be separated into two categories in digital media as, overlay-text and scene-text. In this thesis localization and recognition of video text regardless of its category in digital media is investigated. As a necessary first step, framework of a complete system is discussed. Next, a comparative analysis of feature vector and classification method pairs is presented. Furthermore, multi-part nature of text is exploited by proposing a novel Markov Random Field approach for the classification of text/non-text regions. Additionally, better localization of text is achieved by introducing bounding-box extraction method. And for the recognition of text regions, a handprint based Optical Character Recognition system is thoroughly investigated. During the investigation of text recognition, multi-hypothesis approach for the segmentation of background is proposed by incorporating k-Means clustering. Furthermore, a novel dictionary-based ranking mechanism is proposed for recognition spelling correction. And overall system is simulated on a challenging data set. Also, a through survey on scene-text localization and recognition is presented. Furthermore, challenges are identified and discussed by providing related work on them. Scene-text localization simulations on a public competition data set are also provided. Lastly, in order to improve recognition performance of scene-text on signs that are affected from perspective projection distortion, a rectification method is proposed and simulated.

No description available.

影像中的文字訊息，通常包含著與場景內容相關的重要資訊，如地點、名稱、指示、警告等，因此如何有效地在影像中擷取文字區塊，進而解讀其意義，成為近來電腦視覺領域中相當受矚目的議題。然而在眾多的場景文字偵測方法裡，絕大多數是以英文為偵測目標語言，中文方面的研究相當稀少，而且辨識率遠不及英文。因此，本論文提出以中文和英文為偵測目標語言的方法，分成以下四個主要程序：一、前處理，利用雙邊濾波器(Bilateral filter)使文字區域更加穩定；二、候選文字資訊擷取，考慮文字特徵，選用Canny 邊緣偵測和最大穩定極值區域(Maximally Stable Extremal Region)，分別提取文字邊緣和區域特徵，並結合兩者來優化擷取的資訊；三、文字連結，依中文字結構和直式、橫式兩種書寫方向，設置幾何條件連結候選文字字串；四、候選字串分類，以SVM加入影像中文字的特徵，分類文字字串和非文字字串。使得此方法可以偵測中文和英文兩種語言，並且達到不錯的辨識效果。 / Text messages in an image usually contain useful information related to the scene, such as location, name, direction and warning. As such, robust and efficient scene text detection has gained increasing attention in the area of computer vision recently. However, most existing scene text detection methods are devised to process Latin-based languages. For the few researches that reported the investigation of Chinese text, the detection rate was inferior to the result for English. In this thesis, we propose a multilingual scene text detection algorithm for both Chinese and English. The method comprises of four stages: 1. Preprocessing by bilateral filter to make the text region more stable. 2. Extracting candidate text edge and region using Canny edge detector and Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) respectively. Then combine these two features to achieve more robust results. 3. Linking candidate characters: considering both horizontal and vertical direction, character candidates are clustered into text candidates by using geometrical constraints. 4. Classifying candidate texts using support vector machine (SVM), the text and non-text areas are separated. Experimental results show that the proposed method detects both Chinese and English texts, and achieve satisfactory performance compared to those approaches designed only for English detection.