A Study on Caption Recognition for Multi-color Characters on Complex Background

Abstract

We propose a caption recognition method for multicolor characters on complex background. Caption characters are used for an efficient search on a large amount of recorded TV programs. In the caption character recognition, the caption appearance section and the area is extracted, the character strokes are extracted from the area, and recognized. This paper focuses on caption character strokes extraction and recognition for multi-color characters on complex background which is a very difficult task for the conventional methods. The proposed method extracts decomposed binary images from input color caption image by color clustering. Then character candidates that are composed of combination of connect components are extracted by using recognition certainty. Finally, characters are selected by beyond-color Dynamic Programming method in which weight on recognition certainty and character alignment are used. In the character recognition evaluation of one-line multi-color character string on a complex background, a great improvement was achieved from a conventional technique that can recognize only one-color characters on complex background image.