J. Intell. Syst. 22 (2013), 25 – 47 DOI 10.1515 / jisys-2012-0019 © de Gruyter 2013 Handheld Mobile Device Based Text Region Extraction and Binarization of Image Embedded Text Documents Ayatullah Faruk Mollah, Subhadip Basu, Mita Nasipuri and Dipak Kumar Basu Abstract. Effective text region extraction and binarization of image embedded text doc- uments on mobile devices having limited computational resources is an open research problem. In this paper, we present one such technique for preprocessing images captured with built-in cameras of handheld devices with an aim of developing an efficient Business Card Reader. At first, the card image is processed for isolating foreground components. These foreground components are classified as either text or non-text using different fea- ture descriptors of texts and images. The non-text components are removed and the textual ones are binarized with a fast adaptive algorithm. Specifically, we propose new techniques (targeted to mobile devices) for (i) foreground component isolation, (ii) text extraction and (iii) binarization of text regions from camera captured business card images. Exper- iments with business card images of various resolutions show that the present technique yields better accuracy and involves low computational overhead in comparison with the state-of-the-art. We achieve optimum text/non-text separation performance with images of resolution 800  600 pixels with an average recall rate of 93.90% and a precision rate of 96.84%. It involves a peak memory consumption of 0.68 MB and processing time of 0.102 seconds on a moderately powerful notebook, and 4 seconds of processing time on a PDA. Keywords. Business Card Reader, Text Extraction, Binarization, Mobile Device. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 68U10. 1 Introduction Present day handheld mobile devices such as cell-phones, iPods, iPhones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) etc. usually have a built-in digital camera. The comput- ing power and primary memory of such devices have also increased significantly over time. This newly evolved development platform is attracting researchers and entrepreneurs towards development of various utility applications for such hand- held devices. One of such popular applications is the Business Card Reader (BCR). This application comes in handy for a large majority of service-class people who deal with hundreds of business cards and need an effective digitization solution