Text extraction from scene images by character appearance and structure modeling

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to detect text information from natural scene images. Scene text classification and detection are still open research topics. Our proposed algorithm is able to model both character appearance and structure to generate representative and discriminative text descriptors. The contributions of this paper include three aspects: (1) a new character appearance model by a structure correlation algorithm which extracts discriminative appearance features from detected interest points of character samples; (2) a new text descriptor based on structons and correlatons, which model character structure by structure differences among character samples and structure component co-occurrence; and (3) a new text region localization method by combining color decomposition, character contour refinement, and string line alignment to localize character candidates and refine detected text regions. We perform three groups of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, including text classification, text detection, and character identification. The evaluation results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performance on scene text classification and detection, and significantly outperforms the existing algorithms for character identification. (c) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.