Illumination-Robust Foreground Extraction for Text Area Detection in Outdoor Environment.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that has been a main research topic of computer vision and artificial intelligence now extend its applications to detection of text area from video or image contents taken by camera devices and retrieval of text information from the area. This paper aims to implement a binarization algorithm that removes user intervention and provides robust performance to outdoor lights by using TopHat algorithm and channel transformation technique. In this study, we particularly concentrate on text information of outdoor signboards and validate our proposed technique using those data.