CODEWITHSUNDEEP
opencvocrphoto
user2286991
user2286991

Reputation: 41

number recognition in photography

I want to recognize number from a photograpny, to be specific it will be photo of a men with some number attached on his body - let's say marathon runner with his starting number on his chest.

I've tried Tesseract but it's simple OCR tool which reads only text.

My idea is to use openCV to detect people on photo, then focus on the parts where the number can be placed (like chest), do some more transformation - like increase contrast, recognize rectangles, and then finally try to read the number by OCR.

I'm just starting with photo recognition, so please tell me does it sound reasonable ? Or maybe there is actually some tool for his task ?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4960

Answers (2)

Ilya Evdokimov
Ilya Evdokimov

Reputation: 1394

Yes it is possible. I did an in-depth analysis of marathon runner bibs for one of our users. It is a combination of how images are taken, image preparation before OCR, segmentation to remove false positives (logos, brands, banners, etc.), and powerful OCR software capable of reading less than perfect images and patterns.

See my analysis report of this task here in this www.OCR-IT.com blog post: http://www.ocr-it.com/user-scenario-process-digital-camera-pictures-and-ocr-to-extract-specific-numbers

Upvotes: 1

Jose F. Velez
Jose F. Velez

Reputation: 529

It sounds reasonable, but you will get a high False Recognition Rate due to occlusions and other problem with the number recognition.

I have been working in number recognition for many years and I recommend you using neural networks in which the input to the network is the image with the number it self. This page shows results for several approaches (http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/) for the handwritten number recognition problem (more difficult due to the variability in the number shapes, but more easy from the segmentation point of view).

Upvotes: 0

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