Locating text in complex color images

There is a substantial interest in retrieving images from a large database using the textual information contained in the images. An algorithm which will automatically locate the textual regions in the input image will facilitate this task; the optical character recognizer can then be applied to only those regions of the image which contain text. We present a method for automatically locating text in complex color images. The algorithm first finds the approximate locations of text lines using horizontal spatial variance, and then extracts text components in these boxes using color segmentation. The proposed method has been used to locate text in compact disc (CD) and book cover images, as well as in the images of traffic scenes captured by a video camera. Initial results are encouraging and suggest that these algorithms can be used in image retrieval applications.