Graph-Based Background Suppression for Scene Text Detection

Detecting text in video or natural scene image is quite challenging due to the complex background, various fonts and illumination conditions. The preprocessing period, which suppresses the nontext areas so as to highlight the text areas, is the basis for further text detection. In this paper, a novel graph-based background suppression method for scene text detection is proposed. Considering each pixel as a node in the graph, our approach incorporates pixel-level and context-level features into a graph. Various factors contribute to the unary and pair wise cost function which is optimized via max-flow/min-cut algorithm [16] to get a binary image whose nontext pixels are suppressed so that text pixels are highlighted. Furthermore, the proposed background suppression method could be easily combined with other detection methods to improve the performance. Experimental results on ICDAR 2011 competition dataset show promising performance.