• International Journal of Contents
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.1-5
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• 2010

The rapid growth in communication technology has led to the development of effective ways of sharing ideas and information in the form of speech and images. Understanding this information has become an important research issue and drawn the attention of many researchers. Text in a digital image contains much important information regarding the scene. Detecting and extracting this text is a difficult task and has many challenging issues. The main challenges in extracting text from natural scene images are the variation in the font size, alignment of text, font colors, illumination changes, and reflections in the images. In this paper, we propose a connected component based method to automatically detect the text region in natural images. Since text regions in mages contain mostly repetitions of vertical strokes, we try to find a pattern of closely packed vertical edges. Once the group of edges is found, the neighboring vertical edges are connected to each other. Connected regions whose geometric features lie outside of the valid specifications are considered as outliers and eliminated. The proposed method is more effective than the existing methods for slanted or curved characters. The experimental results are given for the validation of our approach.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.161-166
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• 2011

We present a fast algorithm for Korean text extraction and segmentation from subway signboards using smart phone sensors in order to minimize computational time and memory usage. The algorithm can be used as preprocessing steps for optical character recognition (OCR): binarization, text location, and segmentation. An image of a signboard captured by smart phone camera while holding smart phone by an arbitrary angle is rotated by the detected angle, as if the image was taken by holding a smart phone horizontally. Binarization is only performed once on the subset of connected components instead of the whole image area, resulting in a large reduction in computational time. Text location is guided by user's marker-line placed over the region of interest in binarized image via smart phone touch screen. Then, text segmentation utilizes the data of connected components received in the binarization step, and cuts the string into individual images for designated characters. The resulting data could be used as OCR input, hence solving the most difficult part of OCR on text area included in natural scene images. The experimental results showed that the binarization algorithm of our method is 3.5 and 3.7 times faster than Niblack and Sauvola adaptive-thresholding algorithms, respectively. In addition, our method achieved better quality than other methods.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.1167-1174
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• 2006

Text region detection from a natural scene is useful in many applications such as vehicle license plate recognition. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a text region extraction method using pattern histogram of character-edge maps. We create 16 kinds of edge maps from the extracted edges and then, we create the 8 kinds of edge maps which compound 16 kinds of edge maps, and have a character feature. We extract a candidate of text regions using the 8 kinds of character-edge maps. The verification about candidate of text region used pattern histogram of character-edge maps and structural features of text region. Experimental results show that the proposed method extracts a text regions composed of complex background, various font sizes and font colors effectively.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.441-448
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose a method that segments the image, extracts its slope and compensate it in the image that text and background are mixed. The proposed method uses morphology based preprocessing and extracts the edges using canny operator. And after segmenting the image which the edges are extracted, it excludes the areas which the edges are included, only uses the area which the edges are included and creates the projection histograms according to their various direction slopes. Using them, it takes a slope having the greatest edge concentrativeness of each area and compensates the slope of the scene. On extracting the slope of the mixed scene of the text and background, the method can get better results as 0.7% than the existing methods as it excludes the useless areas that the edges do not exist.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07e
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• pp.1835-1838
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• 2003

Texts in natural images contain significant and detailed informations about the images. Thus, to extract those texts correctly, we suggest a text extraction method using color variance feature. Generally, the texts in images have color variations with the backgrounds. Thus, if we express those variations in 3 dimensional RGB color space, we can emphasize the text regions that can be hard to be captured with a method using intensity variations in the gray-level images. We can even make robust extraction results with the images contaminated by light variations. The color variations are measured by color variance in this paper. First, horizontal and vertical variance images are obtained independently, and we can fine that the text regions have high values of the variances in both directions. Then, the two images are logically ANDed to remove the non-text components with only one directional high variance. We have applied the proposed method to the multiple kinds of the natural images, and we confirmed that the proposed feature can help to find the text regions that can he missed with the following features - intensity variations in the gray-level images and/or color continuity in the color images.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Communication Sciences Conference
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• 2006.07a
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• pp.449-449
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• 2006

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.847-852
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• 2010

Text in natural images has a various and important feature of image. Therefore, to detect text and extraction of text, recognizing it is a studied as an important research area. Lately, many applications of various fields is being developed based on mobile phone camera technology. Detecting edge component form gray-scale image and detect an boundary of text regions by local standard deviation and get an connected components using Euclidean distance of RGB color space. Labeling the detected edges and connected component and get bounding boxes each regions. Candidate of text achieved with heuristic rule of text. Detected candidate text regions was merged for generation for one candidate text region, then text region detected with verifying candidate text region using ectilarity characterization of adjacency and ectilarity between candidate text regions. Experctental results, We improved text region detection rate using completentary of edge and color connected component.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.420-438
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• 2004

Artificially or naturally contained texts in the natural images have significant and detailed information about the scenes. If we develop a method that can extract and recognize those texts in real-time, the method can be applied to many important applications. In this paper, we suggest a new method that extracts the text areas in the natural images using the low-level image features of color continuity. gray-level variation and color valiance and that verifies the extracted candidate regions by using the high-level text feature such as stroke. And the two level features are combined hierarchically. The color continuity is used since most of the characters in the same text lesion have the same color, and the gray-level variation is used since the text strokes are distinctive in their gray-values to the background. Also, the color variance is used since the text strokes are distinctive in their gray-values to the background, and this value is more sensitive than the gray-level variations. The text level stroke features are extracted using a multi-resolution wavelet transforms on the local image areas and the feature vectors are input to a SVM(Support Vector Machine) classifier for the verification. We have tested the proposed method using various kinds of the natural images and have confirmed that the extraction rates are very high even in complex background images.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.11B no.6
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• pp.667-674
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• 2004

Extraction of texts from images is a fundamental and important problem to understand the images. This paper suggests a text region verification method by statistical means of stroke features of the characters. The method extracts 36 dimensional features from $16\times16$sized text and non-text images using wavelet transform - these 36 dimensional features express stroke and direction of characters - and select 12 sub-features out of 36 dimensional features which yield adequate separation between classes. After selecting the features, SVM trains the selected features. For the verification of the text region, each $16\times16$image block is scanned and classified as text or non-text. Then, the text region is finally decided as text region or non-text region. The proposed method is able to verify text regions which can hardly be distin guished.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.29 no.11
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• pp.767-774
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• 2002

Conventional research on image restoration has focused on restoring degraded images resulting from image formation, storage and communication, mainly in the signal processing field. Related research on recovering original image information of caption regions includes a method using BMA(block matching algorithm). The method has problem with frequent incorrect matching and propagating the errors by incorrect matching. Moreover, it is impossible to recover the frames between two scene changes when scene changes occur more than twice. In this paper, we propose a method for recovering original images using EBMA(Extended Block Matching Algorithm) and a region compensation method. To use it in original image recovery, the method extracts a priori knowledge such as information about scene changes, camera motion and caption regions. The method decides the direction of recovery using the extracted caption information(the start and end frames of a caption) and scene change information. According to the direction of recovery, the recovery is performed in units of character components using EBMA and the region compensation method. Experimental results show that EBMA results in good recovery regardless of the speed of moving object and complexity of background in video. The region compensation method recovered original images successfully, when there is no information about the original image to refer to.