Text recognition on images using pre-trained CNN

A text on an image often stores important information and directly carries high level semantics, makes it as important source of information and become a very active research topic. Many studies have shown that the use of CNN-based neural networks is quite effective and accurate for image classification which is the basis of text recognition. It can also be more enhanced by using transfer learning from pre-trained model trained on ImageNet dataset as an initial weight. In this research, the recognition is trained by using Chars74K dataset and the best model results then tested on some samples of IIIT-5K-Dataset. The research results showed that the best accuracy is the model that trained using VGG-16 architecture applied with image transformation of rotation 15deg, image scale of 0.9, and the application of gaussian blur effect. The research model has an accuracy of 97.94% for validation data, 98.16% for test data, and 95.62% for the test data from IIIT-5K-Dataset. Based on these results, it can be concluded that pre-trained CNN can produce good accuracy for text recognition, and the model architecture that used in this study can be used as reference material in the development of text detection systems in the future