Video Text Recognition

SRI International (SRI) has developed ConTEXTract™, a text recognition technology that can find and read text (such as street signs, name tags, and billboards) in real scenes. ConTEXTract™ distinguishes lines of text from other contents in the imagery, processes the lines, and then sends them to an OCR submodule, which recognizes the text. Any OCR engine can be integrated into ConTEXTract with minor modifications.

This development is an outgrowth of several activities over the years at SRI. SRI has had an active R&D program with the United States Postal Service (USPS) over the last 10 years for reading addresses on mail pieces, on which text is often located amid graphics and printed on complex patterned backgrounds. Recently SRI conducted government-sponsored research aimed at extracting information (including text captions and scene text) from large volumes of video imagery, including broadcast news. SRI's ConTEXTract™ software has been licensed to Virage, Inc., a leading vendor of content-based video indexing and information extraction systems, for incorporation into their video cataloging product as a plug-in module.

SRI has been funded by ARDA under the Video Analysis and Content Extraction (VACE) program to extend our video text recognition techniques to read scene text written on any planar surface, even if viewed at an oblique angle. For further information on SRI's work in this program, please visit our VACE Project Page, "Recognition of 3-D Scene Text."

SRI has implemented ConTEXTract™ in a wearable system. A user aims a video or still camera at some text in the scene. The video imagery is captured and processed on a wearable PC that runs the ConTEXTract™ software. The recognized text is displayed on a flat-panel display mounted on the users forearm. SRI envisions a variety of potential applications in digital still cameras and portable electronic devices.

Videos

• Recognition of Hallway Signs and Mail
  (download)(14.9MB)
• Demonstration of Wearable Video Text Recognition
  (download)(9.9MB)

Recognition of Text Outdoors

Evaluation of SRI's Video Text Recognition Process

For further details, contact:

Gregory K. Myers
Program Director
(650) 859-4091