A comparative study of local descriptors for Arabic character recognition on mobile devices

Nowadays, the number of mobile applications based on image registration and recognition is increasing. Most interesting applications include mobile translator which can read text characters in the real world and translates it into the native language instantaneously. In this context, we aim to recognize characters in natural scenes by computing significant points so called key points or features/interest points in the image. So, it will be important to compare and evaluate features descriptors in terms of matching accuracy and processing time in a particular context of natural scene images. In this paper, we were interested on comparing the efficiency of the binary features as alternatives to the traditional SIFT and SURF in matching Arabic characters descended from natural scenes. We demonstrate that the binary descriptor ORB yields not only to similar results in terms of matching characters performance that the famous SIFT but also to faster computation suitable for mobile applications.