Scene text extraction in natural scene images using hierarchical feature combining and verification
Kiyoon Kim, Hyeran Byun, Y.J. Song, Yoojin Choi, Suyoung Chi, K.K. Kim, Yuen-Hei Chung · Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2004. ICPR 2004. · 2004
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.