Automatic text location in images and video frames

Textual data is very important in a number of applications such as image database indexing and document understanding. The goal of automatic text location without character recognition capabilities is to extract image regions that contain only text. These regions can then be either Fed to an optical character recognition module or highlighted for a user. Text location is a very difficult problem because the characters in text can vary in font, size, spacing, alignment, orientation, color and texture. Further, characters are often embedded in a complex background in the image. We propose a new text location algorithm that is suitable in a number of applications, including conversion of newspaper advertisements from paper documents to their electronic versions, World Wide Web search, color image indexing and Video indexing. In many of these applications, it is not necessary to extract all the text, so we emphasize on extracting important text with large size and high contrast. Our algorithm is very fast and has been shown to be successful in extracting important text in a large number of test images. (C) 1998 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.