Enhanced Characterness for Text Detection in the Wild

Text spotting is an interesting research problem as text may appear at any random place and may occur in various forms. Moreover, ability to detect text opens the horizons for improving many advanced computer vision problems. In this paper, we propose a novel language agnostic text detection method utilizing edge-enhanced maximally stable extremal regions (MSERs) in natural scenes by defining strong characterness measures. We show that a simple combination of characterness cues helps in rejecting the non-text regions. These regions are further fine-tuned for rejecting the non-textual neighbor regions. Comprehensive evaluation of the proposed scheme shows that it provides comparative to better generalization performance to the traditional methods for this task.