Word-Wise Script Identification from Video Frames

Script identification is an essential step for the efficient use of the appropriate OCR in multilingual document images. There are various techniques available for script identification from printed and handwritten document images, but script identification from video frames has not been explored much. This paper presents a study of some pre-processing techniques and features for word-wise script identification from video frames. Traditional features, namely Zernike moments, Gabor and gradient, have performed well for handwritten and printed documents having simple backgrounds and adequate resolution for OCR. Video frames are mostly coloured and suffer from low resolution, blur, background noise, to mention a few. In this paper, an attempt has been made to explore whether the traditional script identification techniques can be useful in video frames. Three feature extraction techniques, namely Zernike moments, Gabor and gradient features, and SVM classifiers were considered for analyzing three popular scripts, namely English, Bengali and Hindi. Some pre-processing techniques such as super resolution and skeletonization of the original word images were used in order to overcome the inherent problems with video. Experiments show that the super resolution technique with gradient features has performed well, and an accuracy of 87.5% was achieved when testing on 896 words from three different scripts. The study also reveals that the use of proper pre-processing approaches can be helpful in applying traditional script identification techniques to video frames.