Video text detection and segmentation for optical character recognition

Abstract

In this paper, we present approaches to detecting and segmenting text in videos. The proposed video-text-detection technique is capable of adaptively applying appropriate operators for video frames of different modalities by classifying the background complexities. Effective operators such as the repeated shifting operations are applied for the noise removal of images with high edge density. Meanwhile, a text-enhancement technique is used to highlight the text regions of low-contrast images. A coarse-to-fine projection technique is then employed to extract text lines from video frames. Experimental results indicate that the proposed text-detection approach is superior to the machine-learning-based (such as SVM and neural network), multiresolution-based, and DCT-based approaches in terms of detection and false-alarm rates. Besides text detection, a technique for text segmentation is also proposed based on adaptive thresholding. A commercial OCR package is then used to recognize the segmented foreground text. A satisfactory character-recognition rate is reported in our experiments.