Abstract:

To obtain better segmentation of painting character images on a billet surface, a algorithm is proposed to improve picture quality by image enhancement and filtering, and solve problems in the character image segmentation. An automatic adaptive threshold segmentation algorithm is developed to locate character strings. The algorithm is based on morphology, connected component analysis and twice division to solve the problem of adhesion and fracture present in the image. A filter with a character protection mask is proposed to deal with thin line noises. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms have good performance for images with character adhesion and fractures, and achieve correct segmentation rates of 99.6% and 98.3%, respectively. The algorithms are also effective to solve the problems of thin line noises, achieving a correct segmentation rate of 97.9%.

Key words: billet surface, painting character, image processing, string location, character segmentation