Abstract: Aiming at the lack of digital image processing technology in traditional minority scripts,Shui characters are inherited by oral transmission,paper handwriting,embroidery,stele inscription,woodcut and ancient books.The text is not clear enough and it is difficult to digitally read,which can not meet the new requirements for rescuing endangered shui characters in the information age.In this paper,an algorithm of shui character extraction and segmentation based on image enhancement and region detection is proposed.The illumination of the image is processed by logarithmic and gamma transform,and the noise is reduced by median filtering.Then the text edge details of the gray-scale image of Shui characters are extracted by Sobel operator,and the text contours are extracted by threshold processing,expansion processing and corrosion processing.Finally,the text contours are extracted by Region detection.Detection and text location algorithm can extract and segment ancient Shui characters.This paper uses Python language to simulate the shui characters.The experimental results show that the algorithm can effectively reduce the image noise and extract the shui characters.The separated Shui characters information is more complete,which reduces the workload of ethnic researchers and archaeologists to a certain extent.The algorithm can be applied to the recognition of Shui characters,the protection of cultural relics,the inheritance of Shui culture and other fields,and has a certain application prospect and practical value.

Key words: Image enhancement, Image segmentation, Region detection, Shui characters, Text extraction