Text Detection based on Edge Enhanced Contrast Extremal Region and Tensor Voting in Natural Scene Images

In this paper, a robust text detection method based on edge enhanced contrasting extremal region (CER) is proposed using stroke width transform (SWT) and tensor voting. First, the edge enhanced CER extracts a number of covariant regions, which is a stable connected component from input images. Next, SWT is created by the distance map, which is used to eliminate non-text regions. Then, these candidate text regions are verified based on tensor voting, which uses the input center point in the previous step to compute curve salience values. Finally, the connected component grouping is applied to a cluster closed to characters. The proposed method is evaluated with the ICDAR2003 and ICDAR2013 text detection competition datasets and the experiment results show high accuracy compared to previous methods.