The extraction of characters on dated color postcards

A novel scheme is proposed to extract characters from dated postcards. The illustrations of the postcards appear in various languages and colors embedded in different backgrounds. Due to reproduction and uneven illumination, these characters suffer a severe degradation and hence extracting characters using conventional methods becomes difficult. A morphological operation is proposed to remove irrelevant backgrounds that are connecting to border edges of the postcards. As a result, characters become the most obvious objects. Followed by horizontal and vertical projections, the exact locations of the characters can be located. The proposed scheme has been executed on a set of color images of postcards and proved its efficacy