Text Extraction in Complex Color Document Images for Enhanced Readability

Often we encounter documents with text printed on complex color background. Readability of textual contents in such documents is very poor due to complexity of the background and mix up of color(s) of foreground text with colors of background. Automatic segmentation of foreground text in such document images is very much essential for smooth reading of the document contents either by human or by machine. In this paper we propose a novel approach to extract the foreground text in color document images having complex background. The proposed approach is a hybrid approach which combines connected component and texture feature analysis of potential text regions. The proposed approach utilizes Canny edge detector to detect all possible text edge pixels. Connected component analysis is performed on these edge pixels to identify candidate text regions. Because of background complexity it is also possible that a non-text region may be identified as a text region. This problem is overcome by analyzing the texture features of potential text region corresponding to each connected component. An unsupervised local thresholding is devised to perform foreground segmentation in detected text regions. Finally the text regions which are noisy are identified and reprocessed to further enhance the quality of retrieved foreground. The proposed approach can handle document images with varying background of multiple colors and texture; and foreground text in any color, font, size and orientation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm detects on an average 97.12% of text regions in the source document. Readability of the extracted foreground text is illustrated through Optical character recognition (OCR) in case the text is in English. The proposed approach is compared with some existing methods of foreground separation in document images. Experimental results show that our approach performs better.