Word Extraction Using Area Voronoi Diagram

A method of word extraction based on the area Voronoi diagram is presented in this paper. Firstly, connected components are generated from the input image. Secondly, noise removal is performed including a special symbol detection technique to find some types of special symbols lying between words. Thirdly, base on the area Voronoi diagram, we select appropriate Voronoi edges which separate two neighboring connected components. Finally, words are extracted by merging the connected components based on the Voronoi edge between them. The result generated by this method is satisfactory with the ability to correctly group words of different size, font and arrangement. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves a high accuracy.