Segmentation of Handwritten Gurmukhi Text into Lines

Text line segmentation is an essential pre-processing stage for handwriting recognition in many Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems. It is an important step because inaccurately segmented text lines will cause errors in the recognition stage. Text line segmentation of the handwritten documents is still one of the most complicated problems in developing a reliable OCR. The nature of handwriting makes the process of text line segmentation very challenging. Text characteristics 3can vary in font, size, shape, style, orientation, alignment, texture, color, contrast and background information. These variations turn the process of word detection complex and difficult [2]. In the case of handwritten documents, differently from machine printed, the complexity of the problem even increases. Since handwritten text can vary greatly depending on the user skill, disposition and even cultural background. A new technique to segment a handwritten document into distinct lines of text is presented. The proposed method is