Locating Text within image
artificial-intelligence, c#, image, image-processing
Solution
This is an active area of research. There are literally oodles of academic papers on the subject. It's going to be difficult to give you assistance especially w/o more deatails. Are you looking for specific types of text? Fonts? English-only? Are you familiar with the academic literature?
"Text detection" is a standard problem in any OCR (optical character recognition) system and consequently there are lots of bits of code on the interwebs that deal with it.
I could start listing piles of links from google but I suggest you just do a search for "text detection" and start reading :). There is ample example code available as well.
Problem
I am currently working on a project and my goal is to locate text in an image. OCR'ing the text is not my intention as of yet. I want to basically obtain the bounds of text within an image. I am using the AForge.Net imaging component for manipulation. Any assistance in some sense or another? Update 2/5/09: I've since went along another route in my project. However I did attempt to obtain text using MODI (Microsoft Office Document Imaging). It allows you to OCR an image and pull text from it with some ease.