Scene text detection and tracking for a camera-equipped wearable reading assistant for the blind

  • Authors:

  • Faustin Pégeot;Hideaki Goto

  • Affiliations:

  • Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan;Cyberscience Center, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

  • Venue:
  • ACCV'12 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Computer Vision - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Visually impaired people suffer daily from their disability to read textual information. One of the most anticipated blind-assistive devices is a system equipped with a wearable camera capable of finding the textual information in natural scenes and translating it into sound through a speech synthesizer. To avoid duplicate readings, the device should be able to recognize text areas with the same content, and group them to obtain a single result. Scene text detection and tracking methods attract a lot of interest for these purposes. However, this field is still challenging and methods of scene text detection and tracking are yet to be perfected. This paper proposes a scene text tracking system capable of finding text regions and tracking them in video frames captured by a wearable camera. By combining a text detection method with a feature point tracker, we obtain a robust text tracker which produces much less false positive text images at 2.9 times faster speed compared with the conventional method.