Locating uniform-colored text in video frames

In this paper a method is proposed for locating horizontal, uniform-colored text in video frames. It was observed that when a row of pixels across such a text region is clustered in perceptually uniform L*a*b* color space, the pixels of one of these clusters would belong to the text strokes. These pixels would appeal as a line of short streaks on the row since a typical text region has many vertical and diagonal strokes. The proposed method examines every third row of the the image and checks whether this row passes through a horizontal text region. For a given row R, the pixels of R are hierarchically clustered in L*a*b* space and each cluster is tested whether similar-colored pixels in R´s vicinity are possibly part of a text region. Candidate text blocks are marked by heuristics using information about the cluster´s line of shell streaks. The detected text blocks are fused with the text regions. The method was tested on key frames of several video sequences and was able to locate a wide variety of text