In this paper, we propose three text extraction methods based on intensity information for natural scene images. The first method is composed of gray value stretching and binarization by an average intensity of the image. This method is appropriate to extract texts from complex backgrounds. The second method is a Split and Merge approach which is one of well-known algorithms for image segmentation. The third one is a combination of the two. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches are superior to conventional methods both in simple and complex images.