Graph-Based Text Segmentation Using a Selected Channel Image

Abstract

This paper proposes a graph-based method for segmentation of a text image using a selected colour-channel image. The text colour information usually presents a two polarity trend. According to the observation that the histogram distributions of the respective colour channel images are usually different from each other, we select the colour channel image with the histogram having the biggest distance between the two main peaks, which represents the main foreground colour strength and background colour strength respectively. The peak distance is estimated by the mean-shift procedure performed on each individual channel image. Then, a graph model is constructed on a selected channel image to segment the text image into foreground and background. The proposed method is tested on a public database, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by the experimental results.