Please wait a minute...
Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE A (Applied Physics & Engineering)  2007, Vol. 8 Issue (1 ): 10-    DOI: 10.1631/jzus.2007.A0063
    
Automatic character detection and segmentation in natural scene images
ZHU Kai-hua, QI Fei-hu, JIANG Ren-jie, XU Li
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China
Download:     PDF (0 KB)     
Export: BibTeX | EndNote (RIS)      

Abstract  We present a robust connected-component (CC) based method for automatic detection and segmentation of text in real-scene images. This technique can be applied in robot vision, sign recognition, meeting processing and video indexing. First, a Non-Linear Niblack method (NLNiblack) is proposed to decompose the image into candidate CCs. Then, all these CCs are fed into a cascade of classifiers trained by Adaboost algorithm. Each classifier in the cascade responds to one feature of the CC. Proposed here are 12 novel features which are insensitive to noise, scale, text orientation and text language. The classifier cascade allows non-text CCs of the image to be rapidly discarded while more computation is spent on promising text-like CCs. The CCs passing through the cascade are considered as text components and are used to form the segmentation result. A prototype system was built, with experimental results proving the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Key wordsText detection and segmentation      Adaboost      NLNiblack decomposition method      Attentional cascade     
Received: 18 October 2005     
CLC:  TP391.41  
Cite this article:

ZHU Kai-hua, QI Fei-hu, JIANG Ren-jie, XU Li. Automatic character detection and segmentation in natural scene images. Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE A (Applied Physics & Engineering), 2007, 8(1 ): 10-.

URL:

http://www.zjujournals.com/xueshu/zjus-a/10.1631/jzus.2007.A0063     OR     http://www.zjujournals.com/xueshu/zjus-a/Y2007/V8/I1 /10

[1] Tuo-zhong YAO, Zhi-yu XIANG, Ji-lin LIU. Robust water hazard detection for autonomous off-road navigation[J]. Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE A (Applied Physics & Engineering), 2009, 10(6): 786-793.
[2] JIANG Ren-jie, QI Fei-hu, XU Li, WU Guo-rong, ZHU Kai-hua. A learning-based method to detect and segment text from scene images[J]. Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE A (Applied Physics & Engineering), 2007, 8(4): 568-574.