Scene-Text-Detection Method Robust Against Orientation and Discontiguous Components of Characters

Scene-text detection in natural-scene images is an important technique because scene texts contain location information such as names of places and buildings, but many difficulties still remain regarding practical use. In this paper, we tackle two problems of scene-text detection. The first is the discontiguous component problem in specific languages that contain characters consisting of discontiguous components. The second is the multi-orientation problem in all languages. To solve these two problems, we propose a connected-component-based scene-text-detection method. Our proposed method involves our novel neighbor-character search method using a synthesizable descriptor for the discontiguous-component problems and our novel region descriptor called the rotated bounding box descriptors (RBBs) for rotated characters. We also evaluated our proposed scene-text-detection method by using the well-known MSRA-TD500 dataset that includes rotated characters with discontiguous components.