Text Extraction in HIS Color Space by Weighting Scheme

A robust and efficient text extraction is very important for an accuracy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems. Natural scene images with degradations such as uneven illumination, perspective distortion, complex background and multi color text give many challenges to computer vision task, especially in text extraction. In this paper, we propose a method for extraction of the text in signboard images based on a combination of mean shift algorithm and weighting scheme of hue and saturation in HSI color space for clustering algorithm. The number of clusters is determined automatically by mean shift-based density estimation, in which local clusters are estimated by repeatedly searching for higher density points in feature vector space. Weighting scheme of hue and saturation is used for formulation a new distance measure in cylindrical coordinate for text extraction. The obtained experimental results through various natural scene images are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.