A Hybrid Approach for Line Segmentation in Handwritten Documents

This paper presents an approach for text line segmentation which combines connected component based and projection based information to take advantage of aspects of both methods. The proposed system finds baselines of each connected component. Lines are detected by grouping baselines of connected components belonging to each line by projection information. Components are assigned to lines according to different distance metrics with respect to their size. This study is one of the rare studies that apply line segmentation to Ottoman documents. Further, it proposes a new method, Fourier curve fitting, to detect the peaks in a projection profile. The algorithm is demonstrated on different printed and handwritten Ottoman datasets. Results show that the method manages to segment lines both from printed and handwritten documents under different writing conditions at least with 92% accuracy.