Realization of an embeddable light weight Video OCR

Growing popularity of the connected TV i.e. the TV with Internet, leads to research on providing different value added services like web-TV mash-up to the user. It is very easy to get the textual context from a digital TV broadcast. But in developing countries like India still nearly 90% TV viewers are using analog Radio Frequency (RF) cable as the input TV signal and thus that textual information are difficult to obtain. This paper presents a light weight Video Optical Character Recognition (VOCR) system that can recognize the English texts from Indian TV videos with average 76.53% accuracy which is significantly higher than the 68.18% accuracy of Tesseract on the same set of videos. Moreover the proposed method is significantly less resource intensive compared to Tesseract so that the proposed method can be realized on any embedded platform.