1 February 2004 Unsupervised approach to color video thresholding
Eliza Yingzi Du, Chein-I Chang, Paul David Thouin
Author Affiliations +
Thresholding of video images is a great challenge because of their low spatial resolution and complex background. We investigate the issue of thresholding these images by reducing the number of colors to improve automated text detection and recognition. We develop an unsupervised approach to video images, which can be considered as an RGB color thresholding method. It applies a gray-level thresholding method to a video image in the (R, G, B) color space to produce a single threshold value for each domain. The three (R, G, B)-generated values will be subsequently processed by an effective unsupervised clustering algorithm that is based on a between-class/within-class criterion suggested by Otsu's method. Since thresholding methods designed for document images may not work effectively for video images in many applications, our proposed RGB color thresholding method has shown to be particularly effective in improvement on text detection and recognition, because it can reduce the background complexity while retaining the important text character pixels. Experiments also show that thresholding video images is far more difficult than thresholding document images, and the RGB color thresholding presented performs significantly better than simple histogram-based methods, which generally do not produce satisfactory results.
©(2004) Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
Eliza Yingzi Du, Chein-I Chang, and Paul David Thouin "Unsupervised approach to color video thresholding," Optical Engineering 43(2), (1 February 2004). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.1637364
Published: 1 February 2004
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Cited by 55 scholarly publications and 1 patent.
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KEYWORDS
RGB color model

Video

Image segmentation

Image processing

Optical engineering

Algorithm development

Video processing

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