Improved Ring Radius Transform-Based Reconstruction for Video Character Recognition

Character shape reconstruction in video is challenging due to low contrast, complex backgrounds and arbitrary orientation of characters. This work proposes an Improved Ring Radius Transform (IRRT) for reconstructing impaired characters through medial axis prediction. At first, the technique proposes a novel idea based on the Tangent Vector (TV) concept that identifies each actual pair of end pixels caused by gaps in impaired character components. Next, the actual direction to predict medial axis pixels using IRRT for each pair of end pixels is proposed with a new normal vector concept. The process of prediction repeats iteratively to find all the medial axis pixels for every gap in question. Further, medial axis pixels with their radii are used to reconstruct the shapes of impaired characters. The proposed technique is tested on benchmark datasets consisting of video, natural scenes, objects and multi-lingual data to demonstrate that it reconstructs shapes well, even for heterogeneous data. Comparative studies with different binarization and character recognition methods show that the proposed technique is effective, useful and outperforms existing methods.