Correction of Signboard Distortion by Vertical Stroke Estimation

• Jun Sik Lim,
• In Seop Na,
• Soo Hyung Kim,

Vol. 7, No. 9, September 29, 2013
10.3837/tiis.2013.09.014, Download Paper (Free):

• Korean Signboard
• Text Area
• Correcting perspective distortion
• Components detection
• Text boundary estimation

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a preprocessing method that it is to correct the distortion of text area in Korean signboard images as a preprocessing step to improve character recognition. Distorted perspective in recognizing of Korean signboard text may cause of the low recognition rate. The proposed method consists of four main steps and eight sub-steps: main step consists of potential vertical components detection, vertical components detection, text-boundary estimation and distortion correction. First, potential vertical line components detection consists of four steps, including edge detection for each connected component, pixel distance normalization in the edge, dominant-point detection in the edge and removal of horizontal components. Second, vertical line components detection is composed of removal of diagonal components and extraction of vertical line components. Third, the outline estimation step is composed of the left and right boundary line detection. Finally, distortion of the text image is corrected by bilinear transformation based on the estimated outline. We compared the changes in recognition rates of OCR before and after applying the proposed algorithm. The recognition rate of the distortion corrected signboard images is 29.63% and 21.9% higher at the character and the text unit than those of the original images.

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