Character segmentation of color images from digital camera

Because of the lack of prior knowledge about the color of characters and the disturbance caused by lighting conditions and noise, character segmentation from scene images is a very difficult issue. In this paper, a novel character segmentation method for color images from a digital camera is presented, combining edge detection, a watershed transform and clustering. Since the characters extracted from color images are output in a binary format, they can be input directly to an OCR system for recognition. Experimental results have proven the method's effectiveness.