Character location in scene images from digital camera

In this paper, a robust, connected-component-based character locating method is presented. It is an important part of an optical character recognition (OCR) system. Color clustering is used to separate the color image into homogeneous color layers. Next, for each color layer, every connected component in color layers is analyzed using black adjacency graph (BAG), and the component-bounding box is computed. Then, for coarse detection of characters, an aligning-and-merging-analysis (AMA) scheme is proposed to locate all the potential characters using the information about the bounding boxes of connected components in all color layers. Finally, to eliminate false characters, a four-step identification of characters is used. The experimental results in this paper have proven that the method is effective. (C) 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.