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A method for text line detection in natural images

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Abstract

Text information in natural images is very important to cross-media retrieval, index and understanding. However, its detection is challenging due to varying backgrounds, low contrast between text and non-text regions, perspective distortion and other disturbing factors. In this paper, we propose a novel text line detection method which can detect text line aligned with a straight line in any direction. It is mainly composed of three steps. In the first step, we use the maximal stable extremal region detector with dam line constraint to detect candidate text regions, we then define a similarity measurement between two regions which combines sizes, absolute distance, relative distance, contextual information and color histograms. In the second step, we propose a text line identification algorithm based on the defined similarity measurement. The algorithm firstly searches three regions as the seeds of a line, and then expands to obtain all regions in the line. In the last step, we develop a filter to remove non-text lines. The filter uses a sparse classifier based on two dictionaries which are learned from feature vectors extracted from morphological skeletons of those candidate text lines. A comparative study using two datasets shows the excellent performance of the proposed method for accurate text line detection with horizontal or arbitrary consistent orientation.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to express our sincere thanks to both the anonymous associate editor and reviewers for their constructive comments that have significantly improved the quality as well as readability of the paper.

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.60673088).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jiangsu Electric Power Information Technology Co. Ltd., Nanjing, 210029, China

    Jie Yuan

  2. College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Baogang Wei & Yin Zhang

  3. Department of Computer Science, Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK, SY23 3DB

    Yonghuai Liu

  4. Qianjiang College, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Lidong Wang

Authors
  1. Jie Yuan
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  2. Baogang Wei
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  3. Yonghuai Liu
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  4. Yin Zhang
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  5. Lidong Wang
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Correspondence to Jie Yuan.

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Yuan, J., Wei, B., Liu, Y. et al. A method for text line detection in natural images. Multimed Tools Appl 74, 859–884 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-013-1702-7

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