Thai text localization in natural scene images using Convolutional Neural Network

Text detection in natural scene images is a challenging problem due to many variations and uncontrollable factors comparing to text detection on scanned document. Unlike the existing Thai text detection methods which focus on using connected component analysis combining with other rule-based techniques to localize text, our proposed method is based on a well-known automatic feature extractor neural networks called Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The CNN is first trained with both English and Thai text datasets. A multi-scaled text confidence maps are constructed in order to cope with the text size variations. Some post-processing and Thai text analysis are also employed to acquire text locations in the image. Base on our experimental results, the proposed method can detect English and Thai text from natural scene images with a promising accuracy comparing to the state-of-the-art method.