17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'04) - Volume 2
Scene Text Extraction in Natural Scene Images using Hierarchical Feature Combining and Verification
Cambridge UK
August 23-August 26
ISBN: 0-7695-2128-2
S. Y. Chi, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Korea
K. K. Kim, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Korea
Y. K. Chung, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Korea
We propose a method that extracts text regions in natural scene images using low-level image features and that verifies the extracted regions through a high-level text stroke feature. Then the two level features are combined hierarchically. The low-level features are color continuity, gray-level variation and color variance. The color continuity is used since most of the characters in a text region have the same color, and the gray-level variation is used since the text strokes are distinctive to the background in their gray-level values. Also, the color variance is used since the text strokes are distinctive in their colors to the background, and this value is more sensitive than the gray-level variations. As a high level feature, text stroke is examined using multi-resolution wavelet transforms on local image areas and the feature vector is input to a SVM(Support Vector Machine) for verification. We tested the proposed method with various kinds of the natural scene images and confirmed that extraction rates are high even in complex images.
Citation:
K. C. Kim, H. R. Byun, Y. J. Song, Y. W. Choi, S. Y. Chi, K. K. Kim, Y. K. Chung, "Scene Text Extraction in Natural Scene Images using Hierarchical Feature Combining and Verification," icpr, vol. 2, pp.679-682, 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'04) - Volume 2, 2004