Fast communication: A new approach for text segmentation using a stroke filter

  • Authors:

  • Cheolkon Jung;Qifeng Liu;Joongkyu Kim

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information and Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, 300 Cheoncheon-dong, Suwon, Kyunggido 440-746, Republic of Korea;Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Yongin, Kyunggido 446-712, Republic of Korea;School of Information and Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, 300 Cheoncheon-dong, Suwon, Kyunggido 440-746, Republic of Korea

  • Venue:
  • Signal Processing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We propose a new method for achieving robust text segmentation in images by using a stroke filter. It is known that to segment text accurately and robustly from a complex background is a very difficult task. Most of the existing methods are sensitive to text color, size, font, and background clutter, because they use simple segmentation methods or require prior knowledge about text shape. In this paper, we attempt to consider the intrinsic characteristics of the text by using the stroke filter and design a new and robust algorithm for text segmentation. First, we describe the stroke filter briefly based on local region analysis. Second, the determination of text color polarity and local region growing procedures are performed successively based on the response of the stroke filter. Finally, the feedback procedure by the recognition score from an optical character recognition (OCR) module is used to improve the performance of text segmentation. By means of experiments on a large database, we demonstrate that the performance of our method is quite impressive from the viewpoints of the accuracy and robustness.