A general approach for multi-oriented text line extraction of handwritten documents

Abstract

The multi-orientation occurs frequently in ancient handwritten documents, where the writers try to update a document by adding some annotations in the margins. Due to the margin narrowness, this gives rise to lines in different directions and orientations. Document recognition needs to find the lines everywhere they are written whatever their orientation. This is why we propose in this paper a new approach allowing us to extract the multi-oriented lines in scanned documents. Because of the multi-orientation of lines and their dispersion in the page, we use an image meshing allowing us to progressively and locally determine the lines. Once the meshing is established, the orientation is determined using the Wigner–Ville distribution on the projection histogram profile. This local orientation is then enlarged to limit the orientation in the neighborhood. Afterward, the text lines are extracted locally in each zone basing on the follow-up of the orientation lines and the proximity of connected components. Finally, the connected components that overlap and touch in adjacent lines are separated. The morphology analysis of the terminal letters of Arabic words is here considered. The proposed approach has been experimented on 100 documents reaching an accuracy of about 98.6%.