Rectification and recognition of text in 3-D scenes

Real-world text on street signs, nameplates, etc. often lies in an oblique plane and hence cannot be recognized by traditional OCR systems due to perspective distortion. Furthermore, such text often comprises only one or two lines, preventing the use of existing perspective rectification methods that were primarily designed for images of document pages. We propose an approach that reliably rectifies and subsequently recognizes individual lines of text. Our system, which includes novel algorithms for extraction of text from real-world scenery, perspective rectification, and binarization, has been rigorously tested on still imagery as well as on MPEG-2 video clips in real time. © Springer-Verlag 2005.