Text localization in color documents

A new method for text localization in cover color pages and general color document images is presented. The colors of the document image are reduced to a small number using a color reduction technique based on a Kohonen Self Organized Map (KSOM) neural network. Each color defines a color plane in which the connected components (CCs) are extracted. In each color plane a CC filtering procedure is applied which is followed by a local grouping procedure. At the end of this stage, groups of CCs are constructed which are next refined by obtaining the Direction Of Connection (DOC) property for each CC. Using the DOC property, the groups of CCs are classified as text or non text regions. Finally, text regions identified in the different color planes are superimposed and the final text localization of the entire document is achieved. The proposed technique was extensively tested with a large number of color documents.