Rectifying perspective views of text in 3D scenes using vanishing points

Documents may be captured at any orientation when viewed with a handheld camera. Here, a method of recovering fronto-parallel views of perspectively skewed text documents in single images is presented, useful for 'point-and-click' scanning or when generally seeking regions of text in a scene. We introduce a novel extension to the commonly used 2D projection profiles in document recognition to locate the horizontal vanishing point of the text plane. Following further analysis, we segment the lines of text to determine the style of justification of the paragraphs. The change in line spacings exhibited due to perspective is then used to locate the document's vertical vanishing point. No knowledge of the camera focal length is assumed. Using the vanishing points, a fronto-parallel view is recovered which is then suitable for OCR or other high-level recognition. We provide results demonstrating the algorithm's performance on documents over a wide range of orientations.