Binarization: A Tool for Text Localization

This paper presents a novel procedure for localizing text on scene photos. It takes advantage of the fact that text should present some contrast in comparison with the background, in order to be distinguished by the human eye. A procedure of binarization is applied in order to create appropriate images for the text detection. The connected components of the image are extracted and some heuristic rules are applied in order to identify areas containing text. Finally, the overlaps are handled and the false detections are rejected. The method is evaluated using images of natural scene taken from the robust reading competition of ICDAR2011. The results are promising and some useful conclusions are drawn.