  Due to huge deformation in the camera captured images, variety in nature of
the business cards and the computational constraints of the mobile devices,
design of an efficient Business Card Reader (BCR) is challenging to the
researchers. Extraction of text regions and segmenting them into characters is
one of such challenges. In this paper, we have presented an efficient character
segmentation technique for business card images captured by a cell-phone
camera, designed in our present work towards developing an efficient BCR. At
first, text regions are extracted from the card images and then the skewed ones
are corrected using a computationally efficient skew correction technique. At
last, these skew corrected text regions are segmented into lines and characters
based on horizontal and vertical histogram. Experiments show that the present
technique is efficient and applicable for mobile devices, and the mean
segmentation accuracy of 97.48% is achieved with 3 mega-pixel (500-600 dpi)
images. It takes only 1.1 seconds for segmentation including all the
preprocessing steps on a moderately powerful notebook (DualCore T2370, 1.73
GHz, 1GB RAM, 1MB L2 Cache).
