Enhancement of camera captured text images with specular reflection

Specular reflection of light degrades the quality of scene images. Whenever specular reflection affects the text portion of such an image, its readability is reduced significantly. Consequently, it becomes difficult for an OCR software to detect and recognize similar texts. In the present work, we propose a novel but simple technique to enhance the region of the image with specular reflection. The pixels with specular reflection were identified in YUV color plane. In the next step, it enhances the region by interpolating possible pixel values in YUV space. The proposed method has been compared against a few existing general purpose image enhancement techniques which include (i) histogram equalization, (ii) gamma correction and (iii) Laplacian filter based enhancement method. The proposed approach has been tested on some images from ICDAR 2003 Robust Reading Competition image database. We computed a Mean Opinion Score based measure to show that the proposed method outperforms the existing enhancement techniques for enhancement of readability of texts in images affected by specular reflection.