Text identification in color documents

In complex color documents, text, drawings and graphics are appeared with millions of different colors. In many cases, text regions are overlaid onto drawings or graphics. In this paper, a new method is proposed to automatically detect and extract text in mixed type color documents. The proposed method is based on a combination of an adaptive color reduction (ACR) technique and a page layout analysis (PLA) approach. The ACR technique is used to obtain the optimal number of colors. Then, image is split to separable binary images, each one corresponding to every principal color. The PLA technique is applied independently to each one of the color plains and identifies the text regions. A merging procedure is applied in the final stage to merge the text regions derived from the color plains and to produce the final document.