Visual Text Features for Image Matching

We present a new class of visual text features that are based on text in camera phone images. A robust text detection algorithm locates individual text lines and feeds them to a recognition engine. From the recognized characters, we generate the visual text features in a way that resembles image features. We calculate their location, scale, orientation, and a descriptor that describes the character and word information. We apply visual text features to image matching. To disambiguate false matches, we developed a word-distance matching method. Our experiments with image that contain text show that the new visual text feature based image matching pipeline performs on par or better than a conventional image feature based pipeline while requiring less than 10 bits per feature. This is 4.5× smaller than state-of-the-art visual feature descriptors.