The purpose of this research is to extract the characters from color document images with complex background such as journal covers by using color reduction and binarization.
We proposed an improved algorithm of color reduction based on the modified version of the Ong's SOM that incorporate the edge-preserving smoothing as preprocessing and the sub-sampling using local fractal dimension.
We also propose an algorithm of binarization that enables the character extraction by separating the color of character from the color of background after color reduction.
We perform the comparative experiments of the proposed method in comparison with the other methods using the evaluation with ground truth to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.