Enhancing Text Detection in Natural Scenes: A Hybrid Approach with MSER, Connected Components, and Norm-CLAHE

The textual information present in natural scene images is a valuable clue for many vision-based applications. Locating text areas becomes particularly challenging due to issues like varying lighting conditions, complex backgrounds, non-uniform text sizes, and more. Detecting curved text, in particular, is a demanding task in the fields of computer vision and pattern recognition. This research work proposes a robust approach for the detection of text in natural scene images with different orientations. The proposed method is divided into three key stages: (i) Pre-Processing: The original image is converted to grayscale, and this research propose a new Norm-Contrast-limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) to enhance the contrast in the grayscale image by limiting noise amplification and prevents saturation in dark and bright text regions. (ii) Text Region Extraction: this research combined Otsu's thresholding, Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) and Sobel edge de-tector to extract text regions and enhance edges in the image. (iii) Non-Text Region Removal: In this stage, this research combine Connected Component (CC), Morphological operations, MSER region filters, and basic text geometric properties to create a framework for removing non-text regions and drawing rectangle bounding boxes around the detected text regions. this research assessed the performance of the proposed method utilizing the ICDAR 2017 text dataset, which yielded an overall accuracy of 93.47%, demonstrating highly satisfactory results.