Display text segmentation after learning best-fitted OCR binarization parameters

  • Authors:

  • Antonio Fernández-Caballero;María T. López;José Carlos Castillo

  • Affiliations:

  • Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Instituto de Investigación en Informática de Albacete (I3A), 02071 Albacete, Spain and Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Escuela de Ingenieros Industr ...;Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Instituto de Investigación en Informática de Albacete (I3A), 02071 Albacete, Spain and Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Escuela Superior de Ingenier& ...;Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Instituto de Investigación en Informática de Albacete (I3A), 02071 Albacete, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

In this paper text segmentation in generic displays is proposed through learning the best binarization values for a commercial optical character recognition (OCR) system. The commercial OCR is briefly introduced as well as the parameters that affect the binarization for improving the classification scores. The purpose of this work is to provide the capability to automatically evaluate standard textual display information, so that tasks that involve visual user verification can be performed without human intervention. The problem to be solved is to recognize text characters that appear on the display, as well as the color of the characters' foreground and background. The paper introduces how the thresholds are learnt through: (a) selecting lightness or hue component of a color input cell, (b) enhancing the bitmaps' quality, and (c) calculating the segmentation threshold range for this cell. Then, starting from the threshold ranges learnt at each display cell, the best threshold for each cell is gotten. The input and output data sets for testing the algorithms proposed are described, as well as the analysis of the results obtained.