TextFinder: An Automatic System to Detect and Recognize Text In Images

ÐA robust system is proposed to automatically detect and extract text in images from different sources, including video, newspapers, advertisements, stock certificates, photographs, and checks. Text is first detected using multiscale texture segmentation and spatial cohesion constraints, then cleaned up and extracted using a histogram-based binarization algorithm. An automatic performance evaluation scheme is also proposed. Index TermsÐText reading, character recognition, multimedia indexing, text detection, texture segmentation, filters, hierarchical processing, binarization, connected-components.