A Novel Italic Detection and Rectification Method for Chinese Advertising Images

The italic detection and slant rectification is a key step of optical character recognition (OCR). In this paper, a novel method is proposed to detect and rectify italic characters in Chinese advertising images. Based on observations on structures of many characters, the centroid angle is proposed and a statistical study on it is presented. According to the statistical results, the centroid angle of a Chinese character approximately obeys a Gaussian distribution with its slant angle. Moreover, a Markov Random Field (MRF) model, considering the font-face similarity of neighboring characters and the strong correlation between the centroid angle and the slant angle of a character, is then presented to estimate the slant angle of a character. The italic characters can be detected and rectified by the estimated angle. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed method is effective and applicable.