• To identify an alphabet or numeral, find character contours in an image. Filter out the contours based on size and shape to keep the relevant ones.
• Compare contours with each shape inside the base image. The base image contains all the potential characters, both alphabets, and numerals.
• Find the character with the lowest histogram match score
• Do the above for all character contours, to extract the whole text.

# This code builds the shape context descriptor, which is the core of our alphanumeral comparison
# https://github.com/AdroitAnandAI/Multilingual-Text-Inversion-Detection-of-Scanned-Images
        # points represents the edge shape
        t_points = len(points)
        # getting euclidian distance
        r_array = cdist(points, points)
        # for rotation invariant feature
        am = r_array.argmax()
        max_points = [am / t_points, am % t_points]
        # normalizing
        r_array_n = r_array / r_array.mean()
        # create log space
        r_bin_edges = np.logspace(np.log10(self.r_inner), np.log10(self.r_outer), self.nbins_r)
        r_array_q = np.zeros((t_points, t_points), dtype=int)

        for m in xrange(self.nbins_r):
            r_array_q += (r_array_n < r_bin_edges[m])

        fz = r_array_q > 0

        # getting angles in radians
        theta_array = cdist(points, points, lambda u, v: math.atan2((v[1] - u[1]), (v[0] - u[0])))
        norm_angle = theta_array[max_points[0], max_points[1]]

        # making angles matrix rotation invariant
        theta_array = (theta_array - norm_angle * (np.ones((t_points, t_points)) - np.identity(t_points)))
        # removing all very small values because of float operation
        theta_array[np.abs(theta_array) < 1e-7] = 0

        # 2Pi shifted because we need angels in [0,2Pi]
        theta_array_2 = theta_array + 2 * math.pi * (theta_array < 0)
        # Simple Quantization
        theta_array_q = (1 + np.floor(theta_array_2 / (2 * math.pi / self.nbins_theta))).astype(int)

        # building point descriptor based on angle and distance
        nbins = self.nbins_theta * self.nbins_r
        descriptor = np.zeros((t_points, nbins))
        for i in xrange(t_points):
            sn = np.zeros((self.nbins_r, self.nbins_theta))
            for j in xrange(t_points):
                if (fz[i, j]):
                    sn[r_array_q[i, j] - 1, theta_array_q[i, j] - 1] += 1
            descriptor[i] = sn.reshape(nbins)