Detecting text in natural scenes based on a reduction of photometric effects: Problem of color invariance

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel method for detecting and segmenting text layers in complex images. This method is robust against degradations such as shadows, non-uniform illumination, low-contrast, large signaldependent noise, smear and strain. The proposed method first uses a geodesic transform based on a morphological reconstruction technique to remove dark/light structures connected to the borders of the image and to emphasize on objects in center of the image. Next uses a method based on difference of gamma functions approximated by the Generalized Extreme Value Distribution (GEVD) to find a correct threshold for binarization. The main function of this GEVD is to find the optimum threshold value for image binarization relatively to a significance level. The significance levels are defined in function of the background complexity. In this paper, we show that this method is much simpler than other methods for text binarization and produces better text extraction results on degraded documents and natural scene images. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.