opencvimage-processingcomputer-visionautomatic-license-plate-recognition

How to check if an image region contains text or not?

I'm trying to implement a license plate detection algorithm, so far I have narrowed it down to a few interest regions:

enter image description here

My next step would be to classify each interest region and ignore the false regions. I was thinking maybe I can check each region for character. If the region contains some characters, then it is a plate, otherwise, it's a false region. How would I go about checking for characters?

Another approach I can think of is to use PCA to determine if a region contains plate, but I have no idea how to do it in OpenCV.

Solution

  • Text detection is not an easy task at all. It may be harder than the whole plate detection you are building. I can suggest you a simple tricky approach:

    1. Find contours inside each region.
    2. Find bounding rectangle around each contour.
    3. delete very small or very larg rectangle.
    4. Check weather these contours are represent a straight line. The region with contours that are arranged in linear way is the plate.