Title Extraction from Book Cover Images Using Histogram of Oriented Gradients and Color Information

In this paper, we present a technique to extract the title areas from book cover images. A typical book cover image may contain text, pictures, diagrams as well as complex and irregular background. In addition, the high variability of character features such as thickness, font, position, background and tilt of the text also makes the text extraction task more complicated. Therefore, we propose a two steps efficient method that uses Histogram of Oriented Gradients and color information to find the title areas. Firstly, text localization is carried out to find the title candidates. Finally, refinement process is performed to find the sufficient components of title areas. To obtain the best result, we also use other constraints about the size, ratio between the length and width of the title. We achieve encouraging results of extracted title regions from book cover images which prove the advantages and efficiency of the proposed method.