Abstract
Reading text from scene images is a challenging problem that is receiving much attention, especially since the appearance of imaging devices in low-cost consumer products like mobile phones. This paper presents an easy and fast method to recognize individual characters in images of natural scenes that is applied after an algorithm that robustly locates text on such images. The recognition is based on a gradient direction feature. Our approach also computes the output probability for each class of the character to be recognized. The proposed feature is compared to other features typically used in character recognition. Experimental results with a challenging dataset show the good performance of the proposed method.