Scene character and text recognition: The state-of-the-art

Abstract

Scene text recognition is gaining renewed interest owing to the increase of scene image based applications and new intelligent devices. Unlike recognition of printed text, scene text recognition is challenging due to the complexity of scene images. To provide an overview of the techniques and inspire future research, this paper reviews the advances in scene character and text recognition, with emphasize on character feature representation methods and word recognition models. The papers published in the most recent conferences ECCV 2014, ACCV 2014, ICIP 2014, and ICPR 2014 are also reviewed in this paper to provide the state-of-the-art of scene character and text recognition. The state-of-the-art performance is provided to show the achieved performance so far and demonstrate the potential of deep learning based methods.