A robust arbitrary text detection system for natural scene images

Text detection in the real world images captured in unconstrained environment is an important yet challenging computer vision problem due to a great variety of appearances, cluttered background, and character orientations. In this paper, we present a robust system based on the concepts of Mutual Direction Symmetry (MDS), Mutual Magnitude Symmetry (MMS) and Gradient Vector Symmetry (GVS) properties to identify text pixel candidates regardless of any orientations including curves (e.g. circles, arc shaped) from natural scene images. The method works based on the fact that the text patterns in both Sobel and Canny edge maps of the input images exhibit a similar behavior. For each text pixel candidate, the method proposes to explore SIFT features to refine the text pixel candidates, which results in text representatives. Next an ellipse growing process is introduced based on a nearest neighbor criterion to extract the text components. The text is verified and restored based on text direction and spatial study of pixel distribution of components to filter out non-text components. The proposed method is evaluated on three benchmark datasets, namely, ICDAR2005 and ICDAR2011 for horizontal text evaluation, MSRA-TD500 for non-horizontal straight text evaluation and on our own dataset (CUTE80) that consists of 80 images for curved text evaluation to show its effectiveness and superiority over existing methods.     

A hierarchical recursive method for text detection in natural scene images

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Text detection in natural scene images is a challenging problem in computer vision. To robust detect various texts in complex scenes, a hierarchical recursive...     

基于改进梯度方向直方图的多尺度的行人检测

行人检测是计算机视觉中重要而有挑战的研究方向。为了提高识别精度,提出了一种更有效的特征提取方法,这个方法的特点是提取梯度方向直方图(HOG)特征时能够获得更多的梯度信息,从而更好地生成表征在更大范围内的图像中或者检测窗口中人体细节的特征描述算子;利用线性核函数(LINEAR)的支持向量机(SVM)和HOG训练得到的行人检测分类器,再采取多尺度检测技术和非极大值抑制能够精确定位行人在图像中的位置。实验结果表明,该行人检测系统检测精度较高。     

A novel approach for scene text extraction from synthesized hazy natural images

Pattern Analysis and Applications - The most important intricacy when processing natural scene text images is the existence of fog, smoke or haze. These intrusion elements decrease the contrast and...     

Optimal feature and classifier selection for text region classification in natural scene images using Weka tool

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The problem of text detection and localization in scene images has always been challenging for the researchers over the years due to diversities present in these...     

Curved text detection in blurred/non-blurred video/scene images

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Text detection in video/images is challenging due to the presence of multiple blur caused by defocus and motion. In this paper, we present a new method for...     

Efficient facial expression recognition using histogram of oriented gradients in wavelet domain

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Facial expression recognition plays a significant role in human behavior detection. In this study, we present an efficient and fast facial expression recognition...     

Face mask detection using YOLOv3 and faster R-CNN models: COVID-19 environment

There are many solutions to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus and one of the most effective solutions is wearing a face mask. Almost everyone is wearing face masks at all times in public places during the coronavirus pandemic. This encourages us to explore face mask detection technology to monitor people wearing masks in public places. Most recent and advanced face mask detection approaches are designed using deep learning. In this article, two state-of-the-art object detection models, namely, YOLOv3 and faster R-CNN are used to achieve this task. The authors have trained both the models on a dataset that consists of images of people of two categories that are with and without face masks. This work proposes a technique that will draw bounding boxes (red or green) around the faces of people, based on whether a person is wearing a mask or not, and keeps the record of the ratio of people wearing face masks on the daily basis. The authors have also compared the performance of both the models i.e., their precision rate and inference time.

     

TextPolar: irregular scene text detection using polar representation

International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) - How to precisely detect arbitrary-shaped texts in natural images has recently become a new hot topic in areas of computer vision...     

场景文本检测算法综述

场景文本检测是计算机视觉领域研究的主要方向.文章介绍了近几年深度学习技术在场景文本检测上的应用,包括对场景文本图像检测中存在问题的描述,对近些年场景文本检测算法的分类和分析,以及场景文本检测数据集的介绍.最后总结并展望了未来场景文本检测的发展趋势.     

On-road vehicle detection in varying weather conditions using faster R-CNN with several region proposal networks

Developing automated systems to detect and track on-road vehicles is a demanding research area in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). This article proposes a method for on-road vehicle detection and tracking in varying weather conditions using several region proposal networks (RPNs) of Faster R-CNN. The use of several RPNs in Faster R-CNN is still unexplored in this area of research. The conventional Faster R-CNN produces regions-of-interest (ROIs) through a single fixed sized RPN and therefore cannot detect varying sized vehicles, whereas the present investigation proposes an end-to-end method of on-road vehicle detection where ROIs are generated using several varying sized RPNs and therefore it is able to detect varying sized vehicles. The novelty of the proposed method lies in proposing several varying sized RPNs in conventional Faster R-CNN. The vehicles have been detected in varying weather conditions. Three different public datasets, namely DAWN, CDNet 2014, and LISA datasets have been used to evaluate the performance of the proposed system and it has provided 89.48%, 91.20%, and 95.16% average precision on DAWN, CDNet 2014, and LISA datasets respectively. The proposed system outperforms the existing methods in this regard.

     

Robust text detection in natural scenes using text geometry and visual appearance

This paper proposes a new two-phase approach to robust text detection by integrating the visual appearance and the geometric reasoning rules. In the first phase, geometric rules are used to achieve a higher recall rate. Specifically, a robust stroke width transform (RSWT) feature is proposed to better recover the stroke width by additionally considering the cross of two strokes and the continuousness of the letter border. In the second phase, a classification scheme based on visual appearance features is used to reject the false alarms while keeping the recall rate. To learn a better classifier from multiple visual appearance features, a novel classification method called double soft multiple kernel learning (DS-MKL) is proposed. DS-MKL is motivated by a novel kernel margin perspective for multiple kernel learning and can effectively suppress the influence of noisy base kernels. Comprehensive experiments on the benchmark ICDAR2005 competition dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-phase text detection approach over the state-of-the-art approaches by a performance gain up to 4.4% in terms of F-measure.     

Automated detection and recognition of thyroid nodules in ultrasound images using Improve Cascade Mask R-CNN

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Accurate diagnosis of thyroid nodules using ultrasonography heavily relies on the superb skills and rich experience of senior radiologists, considering the low...     

A novel method for binarization of scene text images and its application in text identification

Pattern Analysis and Applications - The aim of this article is twofold. First, we propose an effective methodology for binarization of scene images. For our present study, we use the publicly...     

A vehicle detection and tracking method for traffic video based on faster R-CNN

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In this paper we present a vehicle detection and tracking method for traffic video analysis based on deep learning technology. Indeed, with the rapid development...     

SynthText3D: synthesizing scene text images from 3D virtual worlds

With the development of deep neural networks,the demand for a significant amount of annotated training data becomes the performance bottlenecks in many fields o...