Character extraction and recognition in natural scene images

With the proposal of the concept of a "smart camera", character recognition in natural scene images has become an interesting but difficult task nowadays. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for extracting characters from text regions of natural scene images with complex backgrounds. Our method first clusters the color feature vectors of the text regions into a number of color classes by applying a modified coarse-fine fuzzy c-means algorithm. Then, different slices are constructed according to these color classes. Characters are eventually extracted from the images using the information of segmentation and recognition. Some experiments have shown that this method is a promising starting point for such applications