Scene Text Detection with Novel Superpixel Based Character Candidate Extraction

Maximally stable extremal region (MSER) is popularly used for candidate character candidate extraction in scene text detection. Its requirement of maximum stability hinders high performance on images of high variability. In this paper, we propose a novel character candidate extraction method based on superpixel segmentation and hierarchical clustering. The proposed superpixel segmentation algorithm for scene text image takes advantage of the color consistency of characters and fuses color and edge information. Based on superpixel segmentation, character candidates are extracted by single-link clustering. To improve the accuracy of non-text candidate filtering, we use a deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) classifier and double threshold strategy for classification. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed superpixel based method performs better than MSER in character candidate extraction, and the proposed system achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.