A hierarchical visual saliency model for character detection in natural scenes

Abstract

Visual saliency models have been introduced to the field of character recognition for detecting characters in natural scenes. Researchers believe that characters have different visual properties from their non-character neighbors, which make them salient. With this assumption, characters should response well to computational models of visual saliency. However in some situations, characters belonging to scene text mignt not be as salient as one might expect. For instance, a signboard is usually very salient but the characters on the signboard might not necessarily be so salient globally. In order to analyze this hypothesis in more depth, we first give a view of how much these background regions, such as sign boards, affect the task of saliency-based character detection in natural scenes. Then we propose a hierarchical-saliency method for detecting characters in natural scenes. Experiments on a dataset with over 3,000 images containing scene text show that when using saliency alone for scene text detection, our proposed hierarchical method is able to capture a larger percentage of text pixels as compared to the conventional single-pass algorithm. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.