STEFANN: Scene Text Editor using Font Adaptive Neural Network

Textual information in a captured scene play important role in scene interpretation and decision making. Pieces of dedicated research work are going on to detect and recognize textual data accurately in images. Though there exist methods that can successfully detect complex text regions present in a scene, to the best of our knowledge there is no work to modify the textual information in an image. This paper deals with a simple text editor that can edit/modify the textual part in an image. Apart from error correction in the text part of the image, this work can directly increase the reusability of images drastically. In this work, at first, we focus on the problem to generate unobserved characters with the similar font and color of an observed text character present in a natural scene with minimum user intervention. To generate the characters, we propose a multi-input neural network that adapts the font-characteristics of a given characters (source), and generate desired characters (target) with similar font features. We also propose a network that transfers color from source to target character without any visible distortion. Next, we place the generated character in a word for its modification maintaining the visual consistency with the other characters in the word. The proposed method is a unified platform that can work like a simple text editor and edit texts in images. We tested our methodology on popular ICDAR 2011 and ICDAR 2013 datasets and results are reported here.