Feature fusion-based text information mining method for natural scenes

Abstract As a crucial medium of information dissemination, text holds a pivotal role in a multitude of applications. However, text detection in complex and unstructured environments presents significant challenges, such as the presence of cluttered backgrounds, variations in appearance, and uneven lighting conditions. To address this issue, this study proposes a text detection framework that leverages multistage edge detection and contextual information. This framework deviates from traditional approaches by incorporating four primary processing steps, including text visual saliency region detection to accentuate the text regions and diminish background interference, multistage edge detection to enhance the conventional stroke width transform results, a texture-based and connected components-based integration to accurately distinguish text from the background, and a context fusion step to recover missing text regions and improve the recall of text detection. The proposed method was evaluated on two widely used benchmark datasets, i.e., the international conference on document analysis and recognition (ICDAR) 2005 dataset and the ICDAR 2011 dataset, and the results indicate the advancedness of the method.