KannadaPado: Mobile-based recognition and cross-lingual transcription of camera captured text in Kannada

We report our recent work on the recognition of scene text captured by mobile cameras, which we have named Kannada Pado. The text region is currently manually cropped using a user-friendly interface, which permits repeated croppings from the captured image in a hierarchical fashion. The scene text segment is then binarized using the algorithm, midline analysis, and propagation for segmentation. The segmented binary text image is recognized using Lipi Gnani Kannada OCR. The recognized text can be transcribed in Roman, Devanagari, and other principal Indian scripts. Such tools will be of immense use in metropolitan cities such as Bengaluru for business visitors and tourists to be able to read important textual information using their mobile itself. The entire implementation is of low computational complexity and hence, runs fully on the mobile itself, without any backend computation. Currently, text recognition accuracy is the bottleneck, which, when improved, will make the app immediately usable by people. Then, it will be made available to the public from Google Playstore.