Abstract: Text understanding in scene images has gained plenty of attention in the computer vision community and it is an important task in many applications as text carries semantically rich information about scene content and context. For instance, reading text in a scene can be applied to autonomous driving, scene understanding or assisting visually impaired people. The general aim of scene text understanding is to localize and recognize text in scene images. Text regions are first localized in the original image by a trained detector model and afterwards fed into a recognition module. The tasks of localization and recognition are highly correlated since an inaccurate localization can affect the recognition task.
The main purpose of this thesis is to devise efficient methods for scene text understanding. We investigate how the latest results on deep learning can advance text understanding pipelines. Recently, Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and derived methods have achieved a significant performance on semantic segmentation and pixel level classification tasks. Therefore, we took benefit of the strengths of FCN approaches in order to detect text in natural scenes. In this thesis we have focused on two challenging tasks of scene text understanding which are Text Detection and Word Spotting. For the task of text detection, we have proposed an efficient text proposal technique in scene images. We have considered the Text Proposals method as the baseline which is an approach to reduce the search space of possible text regions in an image. In order to improve the Text Proposals method we combined it with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same level of accuracy and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that this text proposal approach yields significantly higher recall rates than the line based text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localization. We have also applied this technique on compressed images such as videos from wearable egocentric cameras. For the task of word spotting, we have introduced a novel mid-level word representation method. We have proposed a technique to create and exploit an intermediate representation of images based on text attributes which roughly correspond to character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of Pyramidal Histogram Of Characters (PHOC) by exploiting Fully Convolutional Networks to derive a pixel-wise mapping of the character distribution within candidate word regions. We call this representation the Soft-PHOC. Furthermore, we show how to use Soft-PHOC descriptors for word spotting tasks through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. To evaluate the detected text, we propose a novel line based evaluation along with the classic bounding box based approach. We test our method on incidental scene text images which comprises real-life scenarios such as urban scenes. The importance of incidental scene text images is due to the complexity of backgrounds, perspective, variety of script and language, short text and little linguistic context. All of these factors together makes the incidental scene text images challenging.

Abstract: In this paper we address the problem of unconstrained Word Spotting in scene images. We train a Fully Convolutional Network to produce heatmaps of all the character classes. Then, we employ the Text Proposals approach and, via a rectangle classifier, detect the most likely rectangle for each query word based on the character attribute maps. We evaluate the proposed method on ICDAR2015 and show that it is capable of identifying and recognizing query words in natural scene images.

Abstract: Class-specific text proposal algorithms can efficiently reduce the search space for possible text object locations in an image. In this paper we combine the Text Proposals algorithm with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same recall level and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that such text proposal approaches yield significantly higher recall rates than state-of-the-art text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localizations. Our results on the ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading Competition (Challenge 4) and the COCO-text datasets show that, when combined with strong word classifiers, this recall margin leads to state-of-the-art results in end-to-end scene text recognition.

Abstract: This report presents the final results of the ICDAR 2013 Robust Reading Competition. The competition is structured in three Challenges addressing text extraction in different application domains, namely born-digital images, real scene images and real-scene videos. The Challenges are organised around specific tasks covering text localisation, text segmentation and word recognition. The competition took place in the first quarter of 2013, and received a total of 42 submissions over the different tasks offered. This report describes the datasets and ground truth specification, details the performance evaluation protocols used and presents the final results along with a brief summary of the participating methods.

Abstract: The ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (RRC), initiated in 2003 and re-established in 2011, has become the defacto evaluation standard for the international community. Concurrent with its second incarnation in 2011, a continuous effort started to develop an online framework to facilitate the hosting and management of competitions. This short paper briefly outlines the Robust Reading Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform, the backbone of the Robust Reading Competition, comprising a collection of tools and processes that aim to simplify the management and annotation
of data, and to provide online and offline performance evaluation and analysis services