Novel Text Recognition Based on Modified K-Clustering and Hidden Markov Models

Currently, many researchers have paid more attention to identifying scene texts from the image with background interferences. This study aims to develop an App software system with text recognition on smartphones. Otsu edge detection is applied to binarize the image and to find the parameters (i.e. weights) in a K-cluster. The modified K-cluster algorithm is used to detect the text from an image. The noise in complex background is also filtered out. The detected text gradients are evaluated by histogram of gradient. Accordingly, the distribution of the detected text gradients is generated. Finally, the gradient distribution is utilized by hidden Markov models to recognize the text. The experimental results have shown that the proposed approach can successfully outperform other methods.