An Effective Edge and Texture Based Approach towards Curved Videotext Detection and Extraction

Abstract

In present day video text greatly helps video indexing and retrieval system as they often carry significant semantic information. Video text analysis is challenging due to varying background, multiple orientations and low contrast between text and non-text regions. Proposed approach explores a new framework for curved video text detection and recognition where from the observation that curve text regions can be well defined by edges size and uniform texture, Probable curved text edge detection is accomplished by processing wavelet sub bands followed by text localization by utilizing fast texture descriptor LU-transform. Binarization is achieved by maximal H-transform. A Connected Component filtering method followed by B-Spline curve fitting on centroid of each character vertically aligns each oriented character. The aligned text string is recognized by optical character recognition (OCR). Experiments on various curved video frames shows that proposed method is efficacious and robust in detecting and recognizing curved videotext.