A System to Segment Text and Symbols from Color Maps

Automatic separation of text and symbols from graphics in document image is one of the fundamental aims in graphics recognition. In maps, separation of text and symbols from graphics involves many challenges because the text and symbols frequently touch/overlap with graphical components. Sometimes the colors in a single character are gradually distributed which adds extra difficulty in text and symbol separation from color maps. In this paper we proposed a system to retrieve text and symbol from color map. Here, at first, we separate the map into different foreground layers according to color features and then in each layer, connected component features and skeleton information are used to identify text and symbol from graphics on the basis of their geometrical features. Lastly, segmentation results of the individual layers are combined to get final segmentation results. From the experiment we obtained encouraging results.