Arbitrary warped document image restoration based on segmentation and Thin-Plate Splines

Warping is a common appearance in camera captured document images. It is the primary factor that makes such kind of document images hard to be recognized. Therefore it is necessary to restore warped document image before recognition. In this paper, a novel restore method is presented. The method takes a rough line segmentation and character segmentation firstly in order to estimate the warping direction. Then several pairs of key points mapping between the original image and the restored image are determined and thin-plate splines (TPS), which is an interpolation algorithm, is introduced to restore the image. Such process can effectively describe the warping direction of the document and successfully restore the image. Some experimental results show the effect of the image restoration and compare the recognition rate before and after the restoration based on a same OCR application.