Image Preprocessing for Camera Phone Based Text Recognition

With the increase of digital camera resolution and the advance of digital image processing technologies, various applications for camera phones are introduced newly. One of them is to recognize texts from a still image taken by camera phones or a preview raw image which is not compressed. These images are usually distorted by a variety of factors such as light and non-flat surface. Since the distortions make the text recognition difficult, an image preprocessing step is needed to reduce the distortion. This paper proposes an image preprocessing method for correcting the skewed texts appearing on the preview image from image sensor of camera phones by using simple user interaction. The proposed method is implemented on a commercially available camera phones. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our method.