Detecting Text Line in Handwritten Documents

Although detecting text lines in machine printed documents is typically considered as a solved problem, it is still a challenge to segment handwritten text lines in the general sense given no prior knowledge of scrip. This paper models text line detection as an image segmentation problem by enhancing text line structure using a Gaussian window, and adopting the level set method to evolve text line boundaries. Experiments show that the method, which is script independent, achieves high accuracy for detecting text lines in both handwritten and machine printed documents.