Edge-based method for text detection from complex document images

Detection of text from documents in which text is embedded in complex colored and textured backgrounds is a very challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a simple texture-based approach based on edge information for this task. The performance of our method is compared to that obtained by a method based on the discrete cosine transform which was recently proposed by Y. Zhong et al. (2000) for text localization in compressed digital video. In our experiments, both methods performed about equally well for small-sized text, but our method was better in the case of large-sized text. The principal advantage of our approach is that in addition to the text detection problem, the same edge representation can also be used for other image interpretation tasks