Scene text recognition: No country for old men?

Abstract

It is a generally accepted fact that Off-the-shelf OCR engines do not perform well in unconstrained scenarios like natural scene imagery, where text appears among the clutter of the scene. However, recent research demonstrates that a conventional shape-based OCR engine would be able to produce competitive results in the end-to-end scene text recognition task when provided with a conveniently preprocessed image. In this paper we confirm this finding with a set of experiments where two off-the-shelf OCR engines are combined with an open implementation of a state-of-the-art scene text detection framework. The obtained results demonstrate that in such pipeline, conventional OCR solutions still perform competitively compared to other solutions specifically designed for scene text recognition.