Camera-based degraded character segmentation into individual components

In this article, we present a novel fully automatic character segmentation for camera-based images. This is a top-down approach inspired by the human visual system: the high level step is based on color clustering while the low level one on the phase of log-Gabor filters. First, this latter step deals with remaining touching characters after the color clustering approach and then takes into account the neighborhood information to address the problem of broken characters. Results are very encouraging and the method should be fast enough to be used on embedded platforms like personal digital assistants.