Text extraction from name cards with complex design

This paper addresses the problem of text extraction from name card images with fanciful design containing complicated color background and reverse contrast regions. The proposed method is based on special edge detection followed by grouping of edges based on size, orientation and color attributes. The difficulties from color complexity caused by background color variation or reverse contrast are overcome by edge detection and color histogram. The grouping of edges filters out the background textures or graphical objects. The final detected text grouping is then binarized for OCR. Experimental results show improved text extraction in comparison with a conventional method.