If you are using OpenCV and tesseract, you might have a look at Scene Text Detection in OpenCV 3. It's in the text module within OpenCV_contrib [0].
There are samples here [1] and here [2] to get you started. The paper is here: [3]
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[0] http://docs.opencv.org/3.0-beta/modules/text/doc/erfilter.ht...
[1] https://github.com/Itseez/opencv_contrib/blob/master/modules...
[2] https://github.com/Itseez/opencv_contrib/blob/master/modules...