Text region extraction from low resolution natural scene images using texture features

Automated systems for understanding display boards are finding many applications useful in guiding tourists, assisting visually challenged and also in providing location aware information. Such systems require an automated method to detect and extract text prior to further image analysis. In this paper, a methodology to detect and extract text regions from low resolution natural scene images is presented. The proposed work is texture based and uses DCT based high pass filter to remove constant background. The texture features are then obtained on every 50×50 block of the processed image and potential text blocks are identified using newly defined discriminant functions. Further, the detected text blocks are merged and refined to extract text regions. The proposed method is robust and achieves a detection rate of 96.6% on a variety of 100 low resolution natural scene images each of size 240×320.