Application of Binary Image Quality Assessment Methods to Predict the Quality of Optical Character Recognition Results

One of the continuous challenges related to the growing popularity of mobile devices and embedded systems with limited memory and computational power is the development of relatively fast methods for real-time image and video analysis. One such example is Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which is usually too complex for such devices. Considering that images captured by cameras integrated into mobile devices may be acquired in uncontrolled lighting conditions, some quality issues related to non-uniform illumination may affect the image binarization results and further text recognition results. The solution proposed in this paper is related to a significant reduction in the computational burden, preventing the necessity of full text recognition. Conducting only the initial image binarization using various thresholding methods, the computation of the mutual similarities of binarization results is proposed, making it possible to build a simple model of binary image quality for a fast prediction of the OCR results’ quality. The experimental results provided in the paper obtained for the dataset of 1760 images, as well as the additional verification for a larger dataset, confirm the high correlation of the proposed quality model with text recognition results.