A new method for handwritten scene text detection in video

Abstract

There are many video images where hand written text may appear. Therefore handwritten scene text detection in video is essential and useful for many applications for efficient indexing, retrieval etc. Also there are many video frames where text line may be multi-oriented in nature. To the best of our knowledge there is no work on handwritten text detection in video, which is multi-oriented in nature. In this paper, we present a new method based on maximum color difference and boundary growing method for detection of multi-oriented handwritten scene text in video. The method computes maximum color difference for the average of R, G and B channels of the original frame to enhance the text information. The output of maximum color difference is fed to a K-means algorithm with K=2 to separate text and non-text clusters. Text candidates are obtained by intersecting the text cluster with the Sobel output of the original frame. To tackle the fundamental problem of different orientations and skews of handwritten text, boundary growing method based on a nearest neighbor concept is employed. We evaluate the proposed method by testing on our own handwritten text database and publicly available video data (Hua's data). Experimental results obtained from the proposed method are promising. © 2010 IEEE.