An improved edge profile based method for text detection in images of natural scenes

Text detection in natural images has gained much attention in the last years as it is a primary step towards fully autonomous text recognition. Understanding the visual text content is of a vital importance in many applicative areas from the internet search engines to the PDA signboard translators. Images of natural scenes, however, pose numerous difficulties compared to the traditional scanned documents. They mainly contain diverse complex text of different sizes, styles and colors with complex backgrounds. Furthermore, such images are captured under variable lighting conditions and are often affected by the skew distortion and perspective projections. In this article an improved edge profile based text detection method is presented. It uses a set of heuristic rules to eliminate detection of non-text areas. The method is evaluated on CVL OCR DB, an annotated image database of text in natural scenes.