Text Segmentation from Complex Background Using Sparse Representations

A novel text segmentation method from complex back- ground is presented in this paper. The idea is inspired by the recent development in searching for the sparse sig- nal representation among a family of over-complete atoms, which is called a dictionary. We assume that the image un- der investigation is composed of two components: the fore- ground text and the complex background. We further as- sume that the latter can be modeled as a piece-wise smooth function. Then we choose two dictionaries, where the first one gives sparse representation to one component and non- sparse representation to another while the second one does the opposite. By looking for the sparse representations in each dictionary, we can decompose the image into the two composing components. After that, text segmentation can be easily achieved by applying simple thresholding to the text component. Preliminary experiments show some promising results.