Edge-Based Method for Text Detection from Complex Document Images

Detection of text from documents in which text is embedded in complex colored and textured backgrounds is a very challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a simple texture-based approach based on edge information for this task. The performance of our method is compared to that obtained by a method based on the discrete cosine transform which was recently proposed by Zhong et al. [12] for text localization in compressed digital video. In our experiments, both methods performed about equally well for small-sized text, but our method was better in the case of large-sized text. The principal advantage of our approach is that in addition to the text detection problem, the same edge representation can also be used for other image interpretation tasks.