Separation of Foreground Text from Complex Background in Color Document Images

Reading of the foreground text is difficult in documents having multi colored complex background. Automatic foreground text separation in such document images is very much essential for smooth reading of the document contents. In this paper we propose a hybrid approach which combines connected component analysis and an unsupervised thresholding for separation of text from the complex background. The proposed approach identifies the candidate text regions based on edge detection followed by a connected component analysis. Because of background complexity it is also possible that a non text region may be identified as a text region. To overcome this problem we extract texture features of connected components and analyze the feature values. Finally the threshold value for each detected text region is derived automatically from the data of corresponding image region to perform foreground separation. The proposed approach can handle document images with varying background of multiple colors. Also it can handle foreground text of any color, font and size. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm detects on an average 97.8% of text regions in the source document. Readability of the extracted foreground text is illustrated through OCRing.