Con-text: text detection using background connectivity for fine-grained object classification

Abstract

This paper focuses on fine-grained classification by detecting photographed text in images. We introduce a text detection method that does not try to detect all possible foreground text regions but instead aims to reconstruct the scene background to eliminate non-text regions. Object cues such as color, contrast, and objectiveness are used in corporation with a random forest classifier to detect background pixels in the scene. Results on two publicly available datasets ICDAR03 and a fine-grained Building subcategories of ImageNet shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.