In this paper, we present a new approach for analysis of images for text-localization and extraction. Our approach puts very few constraints on the font, size and color of text and is capable of handling both scene text and artificial text well. In this paper, we exploit two well-known features of text: approximately constant stroke width and local con- trast, and develop a fast, simple, and effective algorithm to detect character strokes. We also show how these can be used for accurate extraction and motivate some advantages of using this approach for text localization over other color- space segmentation based approaches. We analyze the per- formance of our stroke detection algorithm on images col- lected for the robust-reading competitions at ICDAR 2003.