• Smart Media Journal
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.32-40
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• 2017

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.

• Communications of the Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.57-64
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• 2010

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.11
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• pp.5583-5604
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• 2016

In this paper, we present a novel image operator to extract textual information in natural scene images. First, a powerful refiner called the Stroke Color Extension, which extends the widely used Stroke Width Transform by incorporating color information of strokes, is proposed to achieve significantly enhanced performance on intra-character connection and non-character removal. Second, a character classifier is trained by using gradient features. The classifier not only eliminates non-character components but also remains a large number of characters. Third, an effective extractor called the Character Color Transform combines color information of characters and geometry features. It is used to extract potential characters which are not correctly extracted in previous steps. Fourth, a Convolutional Neural Network model is used to verify text candidates, improving the performance of text detection. The proposed technique is tested on two public datasets, i.e., ICDAR2011 dataset and ICDAR2013 dataset. The experimental results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.12B no.7 s.103
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• pp.737-744
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose a three-level color clustering algerian for the binarization of text regions extracted from natural scene images. The proposed algorithm consists of three phases of color segmentation. First, the ordinary images in which the texts are well separated from the background, are binarized. Then, in the second phase, the input image is passed through a high pass filter to deal with those affected by natural or artificial light. Finally, the image Is passed through a low pass filter to deal with the texture in texts and/or background. We have shown that the proposed algorithm is more effective used gray-information binarization algorithm. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm we use a commercial OCR software ARMI 6.0 to observe the recognition accuracies on the binarized images. The experimental results on word and character recognition show that the proposed approach is more accurate than conventional methods by over $35\%$.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.771-789
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• 2019

Text detection has been a popular research topic in the field of computer vision. It is difficult for prevalent text detection algorithms to avoid the dependence on datasets. To overcome this problem, we proposed a novel unsupervised text detection algorithm inspired by bootstrap learning. Firstly, the text candidate in a novel form of superpixel is proposed to improve the text recall rate by image segmentation. Secondly, we propose a unique text sample selection model (TSSM) to extract text samples from the current image and eliminate database dependency. Specifically, to improve the precision of samples, we combine maximally stable extremal regions (MSERs) and the saliency map to generate sample reference maps with a double threshold scheme. Finally, a multiple kernel boosting method is developed to generate a strong text classifier by combining multiple single kernel SVMs based on the samples selected from TSSM. Experimental results on standard datasets demonstrate that our text detection method is robust to complex backgrounds and multilingual text and shows stable performance on different standard datasets.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.1-7
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• 2010

Natural images often contain useful information about the scene such as text or company logos placed on a rectangular shaped plane. The 2D images captured from such objects by a camera are often distorted, because of the effects of the perspective projection camera model. This distortion makes the acquisition of the text information difficult. In this study, we detect the rectangular object on which the text is written, then the image is restored by removing the perspective distortion. The Hough transform is used to detect the boundary lines of the rectangular object and a bilinear transformation is applied to restore the original image.

• 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 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.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2004.08a
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• pp.875-878
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• 2004

Researching in text detection and segmentation has been done for a long period in the OCR area. However, there is some other area that the text detection and segmentation from images can be very useful. In this report, we first propose the design of a mobile translator system which helps non-native speakers to understand the foreign language using ubiquitous mobile network and camera mobile phones. The main focus of the paper will be the algorithm in detecting and segmenting texts embedded in the natural scenes from taken images. The image, which is captured by a camera mobile phone, is transmitted to a translator server. It is initially passed through some preprocessing processes to smooth the image as well as suppress noises. A threshold is applied to binarize the image. Afterward, an edge detection algorithm and connected component analysis are performed on the filtered image to find edges and segment the components in the image. Finally, the pre-defined layout relation constraints are utilized in order to decide which components likely to be texts in the image. A preliminary experiment was done and the system yielded a recognition rate of 94.44% on a set of 36 various natural scene images that contain texts.