Gradient based Approach for Text Detection in Video Frames

In this paper we propose a simple but efficient methodology for text detection in video frames. The method is based on the gradient information and edge map selection. In the proposed method we first find the gradient of the image and then enhance the gradient information. We later binarized the enhanced gradient image and select the edges by taking the intersection of the edge map with the binary information of the enhanced gradient image. We use the Canny edge detector for generating the edge map. The selected edges are then morphologically dilated and opened using suitable structuring elements and used for text regions. We then perform the projection profile analysis to identify the boundary of the text region. At the end, we implement a false positive elimination methodology to improve the text detection results. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of detection rate, false positive rate and misdetection rate.