Feature based Text Extraction System using Connected Component Method

Text detection and segmentation system serves as important method for document analysis as it helps in many content based image analysis tasks. This research paper proposes a connected component technique for text extraction and character segmentation using maximally stable extremal regions (MSERs) for text line formation followed by connected components to determined separate characters. The system uses a cluster size of five which is selected by experimental evaluation for identifying characters. Sobel edge detector is used as it reduces the execution time but at the same time maintains quality of the results. The algorithm is tested along a set of JPEG, PNG and BMP images over varying features like font size, style, colour, background colour and text variation. Further the CPU time in execution of the algorithm with three different edge detectors namely prewitt, sobel and canny is observed. Text identification using MSER gave very good results whereas character segmentation gave on average 94.572% accuracy for the various test cases considered for this study.