Integrating local CNN and global CNN for script identification in natural scene images

Abstract

Script identification in natural scene images is a key pre-step for text recognition and is also an indispensable condition for automatic text understanding systems that are designed for multi-language environments. In this paper, we present a novel framework integrating Local CNN and Global CNN both of which are based on ResNet-20 for script identification. We first obtain a lot of patches and segmented images based on the aspect ratios of the images. Subsequently, these patches and segmented images are used as inputs to Local CNN and Global CNN for training, respectively. Finally, to get the final results, the Adaboost algorithm is used to combine the results of Local CNN and Global CNN for decision-level fusion. Benefiting from such a strategy, Local CNN fully exploits the local features of the image, effectively revealing subtle differences among the scripts that are difficult to distinguish such as English, Greek, and Russian. Moreover, Global CNN mines the global features of the image to improve the accuracy of script identification. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach has a good performance on four public datasets.