Arbitrarily oriented text detection using geodesic distances between corners and skeletons

This paper proposes a corner and skeleton based method for arbitrarily oriented text detection. By calculating the minimum moment of inertia of each candidate text region, we firstly obtain the orientation and minimum bounding box of each connected component. Secondly, based on the fact that corners are frequent and essential patterns in text regions, we propose a geodesic distance between corner and the skeleton of text regions to measure the effective distance between corner and text. Finally, a geodesic distances weighted corner saturation parameter is given to determine which candidate regions are the true text regions. Experimental results in ICDAR 2003 database show that the proposed method can handle the natural scene text of both horizontal and nonhorizontal orientation.