An Enhanced MSER Pruning Algorithm for Detection and
Localization of Bangla Texts from Scene Images
Rashedul Islam, Rafiqul Islam, and Kamrul Talukder
Computer Science and Engineering Discipline, Khulna University, Bangladesh
Abstract: Text detection and localization have great importance for content based
image analysis and text based image indexing. The efficiency of text
recognition depends on the efficiency of text localization. So, the main goal
of the proposed method is to detect and localize text regions with high
accuracy. To achieve this goal, a new and efficient method has been introduced for
localization of Bangla text from scene images. In order to improve precision
and recall as well as f-measure, Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) based method
along with double filtering techniques have been used. As MSER algorithm
generates many false positives, we have introduced double filtering method for
removing these false positives to increase the f-measure to a great extent. Our
proposed method works at three basic levels. Firstly, MSER regions are
generated from the input color image by converting it into gray scale image. Secondly,
some heuristic features are used to filter out most of the false positives or
non-text regions. Lastly, Stroke Width Transform (SWT) based filtering method is
used to filter out remaining non-text regions. Remaining components are then
grouped into candidate text regions marked by bounding box over each region. As
there is no benchmark database for Bangla text, the proposed method is
implemented on our own prepared database consisting of 200 scene images of
Bangla texts and has got prominent performance. To evaluate the performance of
our proposed approach, we have also tested the proposed method on International
Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition( ICDAR) 2013 benchmark database
and have got a better result than the related existing methods.
Keywords: MSER, scene image, ICDAR, aspect ratio, euler number, bangla
text.
Received July 27, 2017; accepted June19, 2018
https://doi.org/10.34028/iajit/17/3/11