Text detection in born-digital images using multiple layer images

In this paper, a new framework for detecting text from webpage and email images is presented. The original image is split into multiple layer images based on the maximum gradient difference (MGD) values to detect text with both strong and weak contrasts. Connected component processing and text detection are performed in each layer image. A novel texture descriptor named T-LBP, is proposed to further filter out non-text candidates with a trained SVM classifier. The ICDAR 2011 born-digital image dataset is used to evaluate and demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Following the same performance evaluation criteria, the proposed method outperforms the winner algorithm of the ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition Challenge 1.