A stroke filter and its application to text localization

Most researchers have used edge, intensity, corner, and texture features for text localization in video images. However, these features do not fully coincide with the features of the text, and can not fulfill all the necessary conditions of the text. Therefore, it is very difficult to localize text robustly in video images which have complex backgrounds with strong edge or texture clutter using these features. In this paper, we propose a stroke filter which can detect strokes of texts for robust text localization. By using this stroke filter, we can remove text candidates which have strong edges but are not text. Furthermore, we apply the stroke filter to our text localization system and localize text more robustly in the video images. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method is verified by extensive experiments on a challenging database containing 480 video images. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.