Text Extraction on Chinese Paintings

This paper presents a scheme to extract inscriptions from a traditional Chinese painting such that the inscriptions and the painting can be enjoyed or studied separately. A two phases morphological operation is used to remove most content of a painting (i.e. background) which makes inscriptions to become the principal object in the remaining image. Since inscriptions are written vertically, we use the alignment property to construct the center point map and use it to locate character lines. Character block is formed by clustering adjacent character lines. The proposed algorithm has been executed on a set of Chinese paintings and proved its efficacy.