Detect text region in image using Opencv

Question

I have an image and want to detect the text regions in it.

I tried TiRG_RAW_20110219 project but the results are not satisfactory. If the input image is http://imgur.com/yCxOvQS,GD38rCa it is producing http://imgur.com/yCxOvQS,GD38rCa#1 as output.

Can anyone suggest some alternative. I wanted this to improve the output of tesseract by sending it only the text region as input.

Answer 1

import cv2


def captch_ex(file_name):
    img = cv2.imread(file_name)

    img_final = cv2.imread(file_name)
    img2gray = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
    ret, mask = cv2.threshold(img2gray, 180, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
    image_final = cv2.bitwise_and(img2gray, img2gray, mask=mask)
    ret, new_img = cv2.threshold(image_final, 180, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)  # for black text , cv.THRESH_BINARY_INV
    '''
            line  8 to 12  : Remove noisy portion 
    '''
    kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_CROSS, (3,
                                                         3))  # to manipulate the orientation of dilution , large x means horizonatally dilating  more, large y means vertically dilating more
    dilated = cv2.dilate(new_img, kernel, iterations=9)  # dilate , more the iteration more the dilation

    # for cv2.x.x

    _, contours, hierarchy = cv2.findContours(dilated, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE)  # findContours returns 3 variables for getting contours

    # for cv3.x.x comment above line and uncomment line below

    #image, contours, hierarchy = cv2.findContours(dilated,cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL,cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE)


    for contour in contours:
        # get rectangle bounding contour
        [x, y, w, h] = cv2.boundingRect(contour)

        # Don't plot small false positives that aren't text
        if w < 35 and h < 35:
            continue

        # draw rectangle around contour on original image
        cv2.rectangle(img, (x, y), (x + w, y + h), (255, 0, 255), 2)

        '''
        #you can crop image and send to OCR  , false detected will return no text :)
        cropped = img_final[y :y +  h , x : x + w]

        s = file_name + '/crop_' + str(index) + '.jpg' 
        cv2.imwrite(s , cropped)
        index = index + 1

        '''
    # write original image with added contours to disk
    cv2.imshow('captcha_result', img)
    cv2.waitKey()


file_name = 'your_image.jpg'
captch_ex(file_name)

Answer 2

If you don't mind getting your hands dirty you could try and grow those text regions into one bigger rectangular region, which you feed to tesseract all at once.

I'd also suggest trying to threshold the image several times and feeding each of those to tesseract separately to see if that helps at all. You can compare the output to dictionary words to automatically determine if a particular OCR result is good or not.