CCD: Connected Component Descriptor for Robust Mosaicing of Camera-Captured Document Images

Abstract

We propose a robust method for mosaicing of document images using features derived from connected components. Each connected component is described using the angular radial transform (ART). To ensure geometric consistency during feature matching, the ART coefficients of a connected component are augmented with those of its two nearest neighbors. The proposed method addresses two critical issues often encountered in correspondence matching: (i) the stability of features and (ii) robustness against false matches due to the multiple instances of characters in a document image. The use of connected components guarantees a stable localization across images. The augmented features ensure a successful correspondence matching even in the presence of multiple similar regions within the page. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on camera captured document images exhibiting large variations in viewpoint, illumination and scale.