Devanagari and Bangla Text Extraction from Natural Scene Images

With the increasing popularity of digital cameras attached with various handheld devices, many new computational challenges have gained significance. One such problem is extraction of texts from natural scene images captured by such devices. The extracted text can be sent to OCR or to a text-to-speech engine for recognition. In this article, we propose a novel and effective scheme based on analysis of connected components for extraction of Devanagari and Bangla texts from camera captured scene images. A common unique feature of these two scripts is the presence of headline and the proposed scheme uses mathematical morphology operations for their extraction. Additionally, we consider a few criteria for robust filtering of text components from such scene images. Moreover, we studied the problem of binarization of such scene images and observed that there are situations when repeated binarization by a well-known global thresholding approach is effective. We tested our algorithm on a repository of 100 scene images containing texts of Devanagari and / or Bangla.