Text Segmentation from Complex Background Using Sparse Representations

Abstract

A novel text segmentation method from complex background is presented in this paper. The idea is inspired by the recent development in searching for the sparse signal representation among a family of over-complete atoms, which is called a dictionary. We assume that the image under investigation is composed of two components: the foreground text and the complex background. We further assume that the latter can be modeled as a piece-wise smooth function. Then we choose two dictionaries, where the first one gives sparse representation to one component and non-sparse representation to another while the second one does the opposite. By looking for the sparse representations in each dictionary, we can decompose the image into the two composing components. After that, text segmentation can be easily achieved by applying simple thresholding to the text component. Preliminary experiments show some promising results.