Conspicuous Character Patterns

Detection of characters in scenery images is often a very difficult problem. Although many researchers have tackled this difficult problem and achieved a good performance, it is still difficult to suppress many false alarms and although missings. This paper investigates a conspicuous character pattern, which is a special pattern designed for easier detection. In order to have an example of the conspicuous character pattern, we select a character font with a larger distance from a non-character pattern distribution and, simultaneously, with a smaller distance from a character pattern distribution. Experimental results showed that the character font selected by this method is actually more conspicuous (i.e., detected more easily) than other fonts.