removing unwanted pixels

I have an image

http://imgur.com/1AyaA

in which i need only the text ,i want to remove extra whitr regions around the text.please help

[Walter Roberson]

*Everything* is text in *some* writing system.

[Jan]

Manually or automatically? Is the picture printed on paper, in a graphics file or imported to Matlab already? Does the problem concern this picture only or do you have a set of pictures? How much noise is allowed in the pictures? Please, kash, post all relevant details.

[kash]

jAN this image is output from another process,i have around 6 pictures in that i need only the text and not others i.e

"Pedestrains Only" which is in english and hindi..

other white regions must be removed

[kash]

Walter consider only english and hindi wordings

[Sean de Wolski]

How can you tell whether it's German/French/Spanish/English by looking at the text alone?

For example: whiskey

[Jan]

@Sean: A partial solution of your problem: "whiskey" is not German.

Answer 1

[Andrei Bobrov]

Im = imread('Q8.png');
BW = im2bw(Im,graythresh(Im));
bw1 = imdilate(BW,[0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1]);
s = regionprops(bw1,'Area');
k = sort([s.Area],'descend');
bw2 = bwareaopen(bw1, k(2)-1);
bw3 = imfill(bw2,'holes');
bwOut = bw3 & BW;
imshow(bwOut)

Answer 2

[Teja Muppirala]

Maybe IMFILL might work?

A = [1 1 1 1; 1 0 1 0; 1 1 1 0]
imfill(A)
imfill(A) - A

[kash]

Teja i need automatic removing

[Sean de Wolski]

@kash, what 's not automagical about that?

Answer 3

[Stephen]

load the image and make it so black==0 and white==1, then...

Words = imclearborder(~IMG)

if you want to crop it, you can try

Words(sum(Words,2)==0,:)=[];
Words(:,sum(Words)==0)=[];