Text localization in images using reverse thresholds algorithm

Abstract

High color similarity between text pixels and background pixels is the major problem that causes failure during text localization. In this paper, a novel algorithm, Reverse Thresholds (RT) algorithm is proposed to localize text from the images with various text-background color similarities. First, a rough calculation is proposed to determine the similarity index for every text region. Then, by applying reverse operation, the best thresholds for each text region are calculated by its similarity index. To remove other uncertainties, self-generated images with the same text features but different similarity index are used as experiment dataset. Experiment result shows that RT algorithm has higher localizing strength which is able to localize text in a wider range of similarity index.