A New Method for Arabic Text Detection in Natural Scene Images

Text in scene images can provide useful and vital information for content-based image analysis. Therefore, text detection and script identification in images are an important task. In this paper, we propose a new method for text detection in natural scene images, particularly for Arabic text, based on a bottom-up approach where four principal steps can be highlighted. The detection of extremely stable and homogeneous regions of interest (ROIs) is based on the Color Stability and Homogeneity Regions (CSHR) proposed technique. These regions are then labeled as textual or non-textual ROI. This identification is based on a structural approach. The textual ROIs are grouped to constitute zones according to spatial relations between them. Finally, the textual or non-textual nature of the constituted zones is refined. This last identification is based on handcrafted features and on features built from a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) after learning. The proposed method was evaluated on the databases used for text detection in natural scene images: the competitions organized in 2017 edition of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR2017), the Urdu-text database and our Natural Scene Image Database for Arabic Text detection (NSIDAT) database. The obtained experimental results seem to be interesting.