How to Detect text from images like Tyre where background and text color are similar?

Question

I am trying to extract text from tyre images since background and foreground text is similar most of the OCR's(tried google OCR and tesseract) fail to detect text. Can you guys suggest some preprocessing steps for this task to increase the OCR efficiency

Sample image -

I have tried thresholding and edge detection for these texts - I not getting proper output for thresholding but getting some lead with edge detection -

here is a result for Holistically-Nested Edge Detection with OpenCV -

Answer 1

A quick test will be the best way to feel the complexity and validate the approach. Let's use the following example:

Color thresholding is the first option to try and it works pretty well taking into account pretty much ideal initial conditions:

A bit different case will require additional tuning, so it might be really hard to develop a solution covering all the cases. Different lighting conditions will potentially lead to a completely different set of thresholds, etc.

Edge filter might provide additional insights, but "textured" letters will become a bit more tricky task. Finally, it might be possible to use NN (with a proper training set) to catch all the specific details, letters, numbers, etc, but no guarantee final accuracy will be high enough.