Spatially Prioritized and Persistent Text Detection and Decoding

—We show how to exploit temporal and spatial coherence to achieve efficient and effective text detection and decoding for a sensor suite moving through an environment in which text occurs at a variety of locations, scales and orientations with respect to the observer. Our method uses simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to extract planar “tiles” representing scene surfaces. It then fuses multiple observations of each tile, captured from different observer poses, using homography transformations. Text is detected using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) methods; MSER enables fusion of multiple observations of blurry text regions in a component tree. The observations from SLAM and MSER are then decoded by an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine. The decoded characters are then clustered into character blocks to obtain an MLE word configuration. This paper’s contributions include: 1) spatiotemporal fusion of tile observatio...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2014
• Where: CBDAR
• Authors: Hsueh-Cheng Wang, Yafim Landa, Maurice F. Fallon, Seth J. Teller
• Keywords: CBDAR 2014