  Object Proposals is a recent computer vision technique receiving increasing
interest from the research community. Its main objective is to generate a
relatively small set of bounding box proposals that are most likely to contain
objects of interest. The use of Object Proposals techniques in the scene text
understanding field is innovative. Motivated by the success of powerful while
expensive techniques to recognize words in a holistic way, Object Proposals
techniques emerge as an alternative to the traditional text detectors.
  In this paper we study to what extent the existing generic Object Proposals
methods may be useful for scene text understanding. Also, we propose a new
Object Proposals algorithm that is specifically designed for text and compare
it with other generic methods in the state of the art. Experiments show that
our proposal is superior in its ability of producing good quality word
proposals in an efficient way. The source code of our method is made publicly
available.
