An Efficient Method for Text Location and Segmentation

Recently, with the development of the information technology, the number of images is increasing rapidly. There is much important text in these images. In order to satisfy the need of images viewing, text identification and text retrieval, this paper presents an efficient Method for text location and segmentation. Firstly, the image is converted into wavelet transform domain. Then three sub-band wavelet images of HxLy, LxHy, HxHy are binarizated and merged into a texture image by linear combination. The texture image is processed by CRLA(constrained run length algorithm) and image smoothing to enhance the candidate text regions. Finally, the text regions are located after 8-connected component growth and filtering out non-text regions. In order to be recognized by OCR(Optical Character Recognition), characters are segmented from text blocks based on the mean values of some slices of text-block. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to overlapped complex background.