A Method for Caption Segmentation using Minimum Spanning Tree

Conventional caption extraction methods use the difference between frames or color segmentation methods from the whole image. Because these methods depend heavily on heuristics, we should have a priori knowledge of the captions to be extracted. Also they are difficult to implement. In this paper, we propose a method that uses little heuristics and simplified algorithm. We use topographical features of characters to extract the character points and use KMST(Kruskal minimum spanning tree) to extract the candidate regions for captions. Character regions are determined by testing several conditions and verifying those candidate regions. Experimental results show that the candidate region extraction rate is 100%, and the character region extraction rate is 98.2%. And then we can see the results that caption area in complex images is well extracted.