Texture based Text Detection in Natural Scene Images - A Help to Blind and Visually Impaired Persons

In this paper, we propose a texture based technique to detect text in grey level natural scene images. This work is a part of the project called Intelligent Glasses. It is a wearable system to facilitate navigation and to assist the blind and visually impaired persons in real world. It has three parts, a bank of stereovision, a processing unit for visual perception and a handheld tactile surface. In its original form, it will be able to provide information about different types of obstacles and their position with respect to user. Our textual/symbolic information interpretation module to the vision system of the Intelligent Glasses will recognize the text from the captured scene and textual and/or symbolic information will be displayed on the handheld tactile. Initial results are encouraging with a text detection rate of 64%.

[1]  Allen R. Hanson,et al.  Automatic Sign Detection and Recognition in Natural Scenes , 2005, 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'05) - Workshops.

[2]  Bernard Gosselin,et al.  From Picture to Speech: an Innovative Application for Embedded Environment , 2003 .

[3]  Nobuo Ezaki,et al.  Text detection from natural scene images: towards a system for visually impaired persons , 2004, ICPR 2004.

[4]  Ramiro Velazquez,et al.  Intelligent Glasses: A New Man-Machine Interface Concept Integrating Computer Vision and Human Tactile Perception , 2003 .

[5]  Nobuo Ezaki,et al.  Text detection from natural scene images: towards a system for visually impaired persons , 2004, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2004. ICPR 2004..

[6]  Robert M. Haralick,et al.  Textural Features for Image Classification , 1973, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern..

[7]  David S. Doermann,et al.  Camera-based analysis of text and documents: a survey , 2005, International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR).