Numbers from Cars

[Rod Lisson]

HI All,

Just found tesseract, installed and performed OCR on the demo files. Works well.

Now before I invest too much time, am I asking too much of this software to recognize numbers on the side of race cars as per the attached image?

Out of the box it doesn't get any text from the image, but not sure if training will help or if I just need some parameters.

Basically I'm trying to get race numbers from hundreds of car images. The fonts should all be close to this example due to regulations.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[David Sixela]

Hi Rod, 
I think you should do some image processing (by using OpenCv for example) to segment the text area from the rest of the image and then pass the output image result in tesseract.

Hope this helps you.

[Rod Lisson]

Thanks David,

Unfortunately I will be processing these from a video feed and the car number could be anywhere in the image. I kind of need to test about 10 images as a car goes past to see if I can recognise a number. No human interaction possible.

This may not be the right tool for my job.

Regards,

Rod

[David Sixela]

My bad i didn't know you we're working with videos, i thought you had images like the one you shared.

[Tom Morris]

On Wednesday, November 8, 2017 at 2:26:43 AM UTC-5, David Sixela wrote:

My bad i didn't know you we're working with videos, i thought you had images like the one you shared.

A video is just a sequence of images. It seems to me the OpenCV's Scene Text Detector might be useful here. If you wanted to get fancy, you could first identify and track the car to help constrain the area that you were looking at. Once you've identified the region with the 1-3 digit number you'll probably have to convert the contrasting colors to black-and-white if black on white isn't always the case.

Tom