Time and Date OCR in CCTV Video

Abstract

Automatic recognition of time and date stamps in CCTV video enables the inclusion of time-based queries in video indexing applications. Such ability needs to deal with problems of low character resolution, non-uniform background, multiplexed video format, and random access to the video file. In this paper, we address these problems and propose a technique that solves the difficult task of character segmentation, by means of a recognition-based process. Our method consists of three main steps: pattern matching, character location and syntactic analysis. The experiments prove the reliability and efficiency of the proposed method, obtaining an overall recognition rate over 80%.