International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence (Jun 2019)

Handwritten Arabic Documents Segmentation into Text Lines using Seam Carving

  • M. Daldali,
  • Abdelghani Souhar

DOI
https://doi.org/10.9781/ijimai.2018.06.002
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5, no. 5
pp. 89 – 96

Abstract

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Inspired from human perception and common text documents characteristics based on readability constraints, an Arabic text line segmentation approach is proposed using seam carving. Taking the gray scale of the image as input data, this technique offers better results at extracting handwritten text lines without the need for the binary representation of the document image. In addition to its fast processing time, its versatility permits to process a multitude of document types, especially documents presenting low text-to-background contrast such as degraded historical manuscripts or complex writing styles like cursive handwriting. Even if our focus in this paper was on Arabic text segmentation, this method is language independent. Tests on a public database of 123 handwritten Arabic documents showed a line detection rate of 97.5% for a matching score of 90%.

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