Patent ID: 8009928

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for detecting and recognizing text in an image, the method comprising: under the control of one or more computer systems configured with executable instructions, processing an input image to form an output image by filtering and segmenting the input image and intersecting the filtered and segmented input image with a mask created from a plurality of bounding boxes, each bounding box enclosing a connected component, each connected component including a plurality of pixels comprising the image and connected on the basis of a predetermined pixel intensity and predefined distance between the pixels, the output image comprising text regions detected by said filtering, segmenting, and intersecting; separately processing the input image to create at least one binary chip, each binary chip comprising one detected text region; recognizing the text in each binary chip from the detected text region comprising the binary chip using an optical character recognizer; separately and independently recognizing the text from the text regions comprising the output image resulting from processing the input image using the optical character recognizer; and logically combining the separately recognized text by taking the logical OR of the recognized text to form a single output producing detected text.