In this paper we describe a new binarisation method designed specifically for OCR of low quality camera images: Background Surface Thresholding or BST. This method is robust to lighting variations and produces images with very little noise and consistent stroke width. BST computes a “surface” of background intensities at every point in the image and performs adaptive thresholding based on this result. The surface is estimated by identifying regions of low-resolution text and interpolating neighbouring background intensities into these regions. The final threshold is a combination of this surface and a global offset. According to our evaluation BST produces considerably fewer OCR errors than Niblack’s local average method while also being more runtime efficient.
Binarising Camera Images for OCR
| Mauritius Seeger, Christopher Dance |
| "Binarising Camera Images for OCR", Mauritius Seeger and Christopher Dance, Proceeding of Sixth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR). September 10th-13th, 2001, Seattle, USA. |
The research we conduct on expressive visual representations is applicable to visual search, object detection, image classification and the automatic extraction of 3D human poses and shapes that can be used for human behavior understanding and prediction, human-robot interaction or even avatar animation. We also extract 3D information from images that can be used for intelligent robot navigation, augmented reality and the 3D reconstruction of objects, buildings or even entire cities.
Our work covers the spectrum from unsupervised to supervised approaches, and from very deep architectures to very compact ones. We’re excited about the promise of big data to bring big performance gains to our algorithms but also passionate about the challenge of working in data-scarce and low-power scenarios.
Furthermore, we believe that a modern computer vision system needs to be able to continuously adapt itself to its environment and to improve itself via lifelong learning. Our driving goal is to use our research to deliver embodied intelligence to our users in robotics, autonomous driving, via phone cameras and any other visual means to reach people wherever they may be.
This web site uses cookies for the site search, to display videos and for aggregate site analytics.
Learn more about these cookies in our privacy notice.
Cookie settings
You may choose which kind of cookies you allow when visiting this website. Click on "Save cookie settings" to apply your choice.
This content is currently blocked. To view the content please either 'Accept social media cookies' or 'Accept all cookies'.
For more information on cookies see our privacy notice.