Adaptive Graph Cut Based Binarization of Video Text Images

Interactive image segmentation which needs the user to give certain hard constraints has shown promising performance for object segmentation. In this paper, we consider characters in text image as a special kind of object, and propose an adaptive graph cut based text binarization method to segment text from background. The main contributions of the paper lie in: 1) in order to make the binarization local adaptive with uneven background, the text region image is firstly roughly split into several sub-images on which graph cut is applied, and 2) considering the unique characteristics of the text, we propose to automatically classify some pixels as text or background with high confidence, severed as hard constraints seeds for graph cut to extract text from background by spreading the seeds into the whole sub-image. The experimental results show that our approach could get better performance in both character extraction accuracy and recognition accuracy.