Accessing textual information embedded in Internet images

Indexing and searching for WWW pages is relying on analyzing text. Current technology cannot process the text embedded in images on WWW pages. This paper argues that this is a significant problem as text in image form is usually semantically important (e.g. headers, titles). The results of a recent study are presented to show that the majority (76%) of words embedded in images do not appear elsewhere in the main text and that the majority (56%) of ALT tag descriptions of images are incorrect of do not exist at all. Research under way to devise tools to extracted text from images based on the way humans perceive color differences is outlined and results are presented.