Character recognition in external scenes by means of vanishing point grouping

We present a method to extract characters from images of outdoor scenes by means of a suitable grouping procedure. The candidate characters are recognized by simple low-level segmentation techniques, and a further elaboration allows to group them in consistent chains by means of their relation to the vanishing points of the scene. The method has been trained and tested using two different sets of images, recorded without any particular attention to the light conditions and the tilt angle of the camera, and very good results are obtained.