Fast and effective text detection

Text in images and videos is a significant cue for visual content understanding and retrieval. In this paper, we present a fast and effective approach to locate text lines even under complex background. First, our algorithm uses the stroke filter to calculate the stroke maps in horizontal, vertical, left-diagonal, right-diagonal directions. Then a 24- dimensional feature is extracted for each sliding window and a SVM is used to obtain rough text regions. The rough text regions are further refined through a group of rules. And candidate text lines were localized more accurately through projection profile of the refined text regions. Finally another SVM classifier based on a 6-dimensional feature is used to verify the candidate text lines. The experimental results on challenging databases show that this approach can fast and effectively detect and localize text lines.