Automatic Detection and Recognition of Shop Name in Outdoor Signboard Images

In this paper, a system for automatic detection and recognition of Korean texts or shop names in outdoor signboard images is described. The system includes detection, binarization and extraction of text in a signboard image captured by a camera of a mobile phone for the recognition of the shop name. It can deal with different font styles and sizes as well as illumination changes. Individual characters detected by connected component analysis are recognized by using nonlinear mesh, in which feature vectors of vertical and horizontal components are extracted from the binarized image. Proposed methods have been applied to a Korean text translation system, which can automatically detect and recognize Korean texts and generate the translation result.