CVL OCR DB, an annotated image database of text in natural scenes, and its usability
Andrej Ikica, Peter Peer · Repository of the University of Ljubljana (University of Ljubljana) · 2011
Text detection and optical character recognition (OCR) in images of natural scenes is a fairly new computer vision area but yet very useful in numerous applicative areas. Although many implementations gain promising results, they are evaluated mostly on the private image collections that are very hard or even impossible to get. Therefore, it is very difficult to compare them objectively. Since our aim is to help the research community in standardizing the evaluation of the text detection and OCR methods, we present CVL OCR DB, a public database of annotated images of text in diverse natural scenes, captured at varying weather and lighting conditions. All the images in the database are annotated with the text region and single character location informa- tion, making CVL OCR DB suitable for testing and evaluating both text detection and OCR methods. Moreover, all the single characters are also cropped from the original images and stored individually, turning our database into a huge collection of characters suitable for training and testing OCR classifiers.