Specification of signboard region and extraction of characters from scene picture

In this paper, a method which specifies the signboard region and extracts the characters inside the signboard is proposed. We usually take notes not to forget what we should leave to memory. But it is often that the work is too intrusive. Our aim is the development of a new input-interface so as to input texts from a picture. Most of signboards are composed of almost monochromatic region. On the basis of the observation, image segmentation using color information is applied, and then we get some binary images by applying threshold for each segmented region. Each binary image is enclosed by the smallest circumscribed square. The signboard region is specified according to distribution and area of the white pixels inside the square. As a result of experiment, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.