A New Method to Extract Text from Natural Scenes

This paper presents a new method for text detection, location and binarization fron natural scenes. Several morphological steps are used to detect the general positian of the text, including English, Chinese and Japanese characters. Next bounding boxes are processed by a new "Expand, Break and Merge" (EBM) method to get the precise text areas. Finally, text is binarized by a hybrid method based on Otsu and Niblack. This new approach can extract different kinds of text from complicated natural scenes. It is insensitive to noise, distortedness, and text orientation. It also has good performance on extracting texts in various sizes.