A Textural Layer L0 Gradient Minimization based De-noise Method for Scene Text Images

Text images in complex scenes are often suffer from various noises, which result in quality degradation and further effect the performance of automatic analysis. A novel denoise method for scene text images is proposed in this paper. With an image layered decomposition model, text images can be decomposed into a structural layer and a textual layer. Text component can be represented by the structural layer, and the texture layer of the image is closely related to the fine details and random noises. Based on this observation, a L-0 gradient minimization scheme is applied on the textual layer in our method. The L-0 gradient minimization is used to control the number of non-zero gradient values in a textured layer image, which maintains important features in the image while effectively suppress the gradients with small magnitude, which usually associate with noise. Comprehensive experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively remove the noise in the images and improve the visual quality of the text images.