Chinese text location under complex background using Gabor filter and SVM

For the Chinese text location under complex background, this paper presents a novel method by combining Gabor filter and support vector machine (SVM). It bases on such a fact that Chinese characters are composed of four kinds of strokes. By extracting four kinds of stroke features with Gabor filters, Chinese text location problem can be transformed into a texture classification one, which can use SVM classifier for the purpose. So, the proposed method is composed of two phases. First, Gabor filters with different scales and orientations are employed to obtain four texture images representing the stokes of Chinese text in horizontal line, top-down vertical line, left-downward slope line and short pausing stroke directions. Then, the text regions and background regions in four texture images are used to train four SVM classifiers to distinguish the texture in four directions, by integrating an SVM classification network to obtain the final classification results, according to the sum of the weights to determine whether the block is the text region. Some experiments are conducted on a large amount of typical images with different texts and different fonts. Compared with some existing methods, the proposed approach achieves better results for Chinese text location.