“…1 Traditionally, word spotting and recognition have focused on document images [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], where the main challenges come from differences in writing styles: the writing styles of different writers may be completely different for the same word. Recently, however, with the development of powerful computer vision techniques during the last decade, there has been an increased interest in performing word spotting and recognition on natural images [3], [4], [5], [15], [16], [17], which poses different challenges such as huge variations in illumination, point of view, typography, etc.…”