Sign detection based text localization in mobile device captured scene images

Abstract

Sign text is one of the most seen text types appearing in scene images. In this paper, we present a new sign text localization method for scene images captured by mobile device. The candidate characters are first localized by detecting closed boundaries in the image. Then, based on the properties of signboard, the convex regions that contain enough candidate characters are extracted and marked as sign regions. After removing the false positives using the proposed layer analysis, the candidate characters inside the detected sign regions are yielded as sign text. A sign text database with 241 images captured by a mobile device was used to evaluate our method. The experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.