A morphology-based border noise removal method for camera-captured label images

Abstract

Printed labels are widely used in our life to track items, especially in logistics management. If item information on a label could be recognized automatically, the efficiency of the logistics would be greatly improved. However, some particular properties of label images make them difficult for off-the-shelf optical character recognition (OCR) system to recognize directly. To prepare the label images for OCR, border noise removal is an important step. With text region only, the resulting image would be easier for OCR to read. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective approach to remove border noise in textile label images. Border noise in those label images is more complex than that in conventional document images. Our solution consists of four parts: label boundary detection, label blank region extraction, holes filling and border noise deletion. The experiment shows that the proposed method yields satisfactory performance. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.