Machine reading of camera-held low quality text images: An ICA-based image enhancement approach for improving OCR accuracy

An Independent Component Analysis (ICA)-based image enhancement technique is presented to improve the accuracy for machine reading of camera-based images. Images of inscriptions that are normally engraved on stones or other durable materials and found at the sites of historical monuments are taken as a reference for conducting the present experiments. Significant improvement in recognition rate of a commercial OCR system shows the potential of the proposed ICA-based method. It improves word and character recognition accuracies of the OCR system by 68.6% (from 11.2% to 79.8%) and 57.3% (from 34.8% to 92.1%), respectively.