Text detection and recognition in images and video frames

This paper presents a new method for detecting and recognizing text in complex images and video frames. Text detection is performed in a two-step approach that combines the speed of a text localization step, enabling text size normalization, with the strength of a machine learning text verification step applied on background independent features. Text recognition, applied on the detected text lines, is addressed by a text segmentation step followed by an traditional OCR algorithm within a multi-hypotheses framework relying on multiple segments, language modeling and OCR statistics. Experiments conducted on large databases of real broadcast documents demonstrate the validity of our approach. (C) 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.