Multi-strategy tracking based text detection in scene videos

Text detection and tracking in scene videos are important prerequisites for content-based video analysis and retrieval, wearable camera systems and mobile devices augmented reality translators. Here, we present a novel multi-strategy tracking based text detection approach in scene videos. In this approach, a state-of-the-art scene text detection module [1] is first used to detect text in each video frame. Then a multi-strategy text tracking technique is proposed, which uses tracking by detection, spatio-temporal context learning, and linear prediction to predict the candidate text location sequentially, and adaptively integrates and selects the best matching text block from the candidate blocks with a rule-based method. This multi-strategy tracking technique can combine the advantages of the three different tracking techniques and afterwards make remedies to the disadvantages of them. Experiments on a variety of scene videos show that our proposed approach is effective and robust to reduce false alarm and improve the accuracy of detection.