In this work we propose a novel method for automatic gas meter reading from real world images. In a wide range of countries all over the world, the existing automatic technology is not adopted, usually the reading is manually done on site, and a picture is taken through a mobile device as a proof of reading. In order to confirm the reading, a tedious work of checking the proof images is commonly done offline by an operator. With this contribution we aim to supply an effective system, able to provide a real support to the validation process reducing the human effort and the time consumed. We exploit both region-based and Maximally Stable Extremal Regions techniques, during the phase involving the localization of the meter area and to detect the meter counter digits in the detection step respectively. The evaluation has been carried out on every step of our approach, as well as on the overall assessment; although the problem is complex, the proposed method leads to good results even when applied to degraded images, it represents an effective solution to the gas meter reading problem and it can be utilized in real applications

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In this work we propose a novel method for text spotting from scene images based on augmented Multi-resolution Maximally Stable Extremal Regions and Convolutional Neural Networks. The goal of this work is augmenting text character proposals to maximize their coverage rate over text elements in scene images, to obtain satisfying text detection rates without the need of using very deep architectures nor large amount of training data. Using simple and fast geometric transformations on multi-resolution proposals our system achieves good results for several challenging datasets while also being computationally efficient to train and test on a desktop computer

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Abstract. Text localization from scene images is a challenging task that finds application in many areas. In this work, we propose a novel hybrid text localization approach that exploits Multi-resolution Maximally Stable Extremal Regions to discard false-positive detections from the text confidence maps generated by a Fast Feature Pyramid based sliding window classifier. The use of a multi-scale approach during both feature computation and connected component extraction allows our method to identify uncommon text elements that are usually not detected by competing algorithms, while the adoption of approximated features and appropriately filtered connected components assures a low overall computational complexity of the proposed system.