Scene Text Separation Using Touch Screen Interface

Text separation in natural scenes is a crucial step to recognize scene text. Since computational power in a mobile device is limited, current text extraction methods are impractical in real-time devices. We propose efficient text extraction methods by utilizing user´s indication. When user simply indicates focus or draws the line on touch screen, the system can extract text in natural scenes efficiently using this information. Text region is estimated from user´s touch and color candidates are extracted. After that, the system chooses color candidates which have high probability of texts. In the experiments on ICDAR 2003 database, our method demonstrates effective performance and usability in a portable device.