Algorithm to detect presence of text on image

Question

With my new assignment I am looking for a method to detect the presence of text on image. The image is a map - can be for example google map. The task is to detect where the street/city label is placed.

I know that opencv library has algorithm that can detect features (for example human faces) - haar classifier or hog (histogram of oriented gradients), but I heard that learning process of such algorithms is quite difficult.

Do you know of any algorithm, method or a library that could do that (detect presence of text on image)?

Thanks, John

Answer 1

There is a standard problem in vision called text detection in images. it is quite different to OCR. OCR concerms itself with what it says, while text detection is about determining if there is text in the image. Adi Shavit's third link is a method to address this problem. You can look on google scholar well cited articles on text detection.