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This paper presents an approach to character recognition in natural scene images. Recognizing such text is a challenging problem in the field of Computer Vision, more than the recognition of scanned documents due to several reasons. We propose a classification technique for classifying characters based on a pipeline of image processing operations and ensemble machine learning techniques. This pipeline tackles problems where Optical Character Recognition (OCR) fails. We present a framework that comprises a sequence of operations such as resizing, grey scaling, thresholding, morphological opening and median filtering on the images to handle background clutter, noise, multi-sized and multi-oriented characters and variance in illumination. We used image pixels and HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradients) as features to train three different models based on Nearest-Neighbour, Random Forest and Extra Tree classifiers. When the input images were pre-processed, HOG features were extracted and fed into extra tree classifier, and the model classified the characters with maximum accuracy, among the other models that we tested. The proposed steps have been experimentally proven to yield better accuracy than the present state-of-the-art classification techniques on the Chars74k dataset. In addition, the paper includes a comparative study elaborating on various image processing operations, feature extraction methods and classification techniques.

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