Ruling line detection and removal

In this paper we present a procedure for removing ruling lines from a handwritten document image that does not require any preprocessing or postprocessing tasks and it does not break existing characters. We take advantage of common ruling line properties such as uniform width, predictable spacing, position vs. text, etc. The deletion procedure of the detected ruling line is based on the fact that the coordinates of three collinear points have a determinant equal to zero. The system is evaluated on synthetic page images in five different languages and is compared to a previous methodology.