Detection and segmentation of antialiased text in screen images

Various software applications deal with analyzing the textual content of screen captures. Interpreting these images as text poses several challenges, relative to images traditionally handled by optical character recognition (OCR) engines. One such challenge is caused by text antialiasing, a technique which blurs the edges of characters, to reduce jagged appearance. This blurring changes the character images according to context, and can sometimes fuse them together. In this paper, we offer a low-cost method that can be used as a preprocessing stage, prior to OCR. Our method locates antialiased text in a screen image and segments it into separate character images. Our proposed algorithm significantly improves OCR results, particularly in images with colored text of small font size, such as in graphic user interface (GUI) screens. © 2011 IEEE.