Book excerpt: This book presents a systematic introduction to the latest developments in video text detection. Opening with a discussion of the underlying theory and a brief history of video text detection, the text proceeds to cover pre-processing and post-processing techniques, character segmentation and recognition, identification of non-English scripts, techniques for multi-modal analysis and performance evaluation. The detection of text from both natural video scenes and artificially inserted captions is examined. Various applications of the technology are also reviewed, from license plate recognition and road navigation assistance, to sports analysis and video advertising systems. Features: explains the fundamental theory in a succinct manner, supplemented with references for further reading; highlights practical techniques to help the reader understand and develop their own video text detection systems and applications; serves as an easy-to-navigate reference, presenting the material in self-contained chapters.