Image Segmentation for Text Extraction

This paper presents a methodology for extracting text from images such as document images, scene images etc. Text that appears in these images contains important and useful information. Text extraction in images has been used in large variety of applications such as mobile robot navigation, document retrieving, object identification, vehicle license plate detection, etc. In this paper, we employ discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for extracting text information from complex images. The input image may be a colour image or a grayscale image. If the image is colour image, then preprocessing is required. For extracting text edges, the sobel edge detector is applied on each subimage. The resultant edges so obtained are used to form an edge map. Morphological operations are applied on the processed edge map and further thresholding is applied to o improve the performance. KeywordsImage segmentation, Discrete Wavelet Transform, Haar wavelets.