Text captured as part of outdoor surroundings in a photograph
Scene text is text that appears in an image captured by a camera in an outdoor environment.
The image displays the coach category in text format. We can observe that the coach belongs to Sleeper category.
The detection and recognition of scene text from camera captured images are computer vision tasks which became important after smart phones with good cameras became ubiquitous. The text in scene images varies in shape, font, colour and position. The recognition of scene text is further complicated sometimes by non-uniform illumination and focus.
To improve scene text recognition, the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) conducts a robust reading competition once in two years. The competition was held in 2003, 2005[1][2][3] and during every ICDAR conference.[4][5][6] International association for pattern recognition (IAPR) has created a list of datasets as Reading systems.[7]