Automatic detection and verification of text regions in news video frames

Textual information in a video is very useful for video indexing and retrieving. Detecting text blocks in video frames is the first important procedure for extracting the textual information. Automatic text location is a very difficult problem due to the large variety of character styles and the complex backgrounds. In this paper, we describe the various steps of the proposed text detection algorithm. First, the gray scale edges are detected and smoothed horizontally. Second, the edge image is binarized, and run length analysis is applied to find candidate text blocks. Finally, each detected block is verified by an improved logical level technique (ILLT). Experiments show this method is not sensitive to color/texture changes of the characters, and can be used to detect text lines in news videos effectively.