Method and system for detecting and recognizing text in images

A system for detecting and recognizing text in an image, the system comprising:

• a text-detection module, the text-detection module configured to detect text regions in an image by filtering and segmenting the image and intersecting the filtered and segmented image with a mask created from a plurality of bounding boxes, each bounding box enclosing a connected component, each connected component including a plurality of pixels comprising the image and connected on the basis of a predetermined pixel intensity and predefined distance between the pixels to form an output image and to form at least one gray-level image chip;
• a chip-processing module, the chip-processing module configured to process the at least one gray-level image chip to form at least one binary chip;
• and
• an optical character-recognizer module, the optical character-recognizer module configured to:
• recognize the text in the at least one binary chip using an optical character-recognizer;
• separately and independently recognize the text in the output image using the optical character-recognizer;
• and
• logically combining the separately recognized text by taking the logical OR of the recognized text to form a single output producing detected text.

A non-transitory computer program product for use with a computer, the computer program product comprising a computer usable medium having a computer-readable program code embodied therein for detecting and recognizing text in an image, the computer program product performing:

• processing an image to form an output image by filtering and segmenting the image and intersecting the filtered and segmented image with a mask created from a plurality of bounding boxes, each bounding box enclosing a connected component, each connected component including a plurality of pixels comprising the image and connected on the basis of a predetermined pixel intensity and predefined distance between the pixels, the output image comprising text regions detected by said filtering, segmenting, and intersecting;
• processing the image to create at least one binary chip, each of the at least one binary chips comprising one detected text region;
• recognizing the text in each of the at least one binary chips using an optical character recognizer;
• separately and independently recognizing the text from the text regions comprising the output image resulting from processing the input image using the optical character recognizer;
• and
• logically combining the separately recognized text by taking the logical OR of the recognized text to form a single output producing detected text.