Recognition of Very Low-Resolution Characters from Motion Images Captured by a Portable Digital Camera

Many kinds of digital devices can easily take motion images such as digital video cameras or camera-equipped cellular phones. If an image is taken with such devices under everyday situations, the resolution is not always high; moreover, hand vibration can cause blurring, making accurate recognition of characters from such poor images difficult. This paper presents a new character recognition algorithm for very low-resolution video data. The proposed method uses multi-frame images to integrate information from each image based on a subspace method. Experimental results using a DV camera and a phone camera show that our method improves recognition accuracy.