Natural Image Character Recognition Using Oriented Basic Image Features

Whilst effective methods exist for character recognition in certain contexts, such as characters taken from printed or handwritten documents, these methods have not performed well when tested with characters taken from natural images. In this work we introduce oriented Basic Image Features (oBIFs), a system based upon local symmetry and orientation, and demonstrate how they can be used within a mutliscale system for natural image character recognition. The best performing system outperforms previous methods by 8.1% and 1.2% when tested with the two most common datasets.