Component-based Segmentation of words from handwritten Arabic text

Efficient preprocessing is very essential for automatic recognition of handwritten documents. In this paper, techniques on segmenting words in handwritten Arabic text are presented. Firstly, connected components (ccs) are extracted, and distances among different components are analyzed. The statistical distribution of this distance is then obtained to determine an optimal threshold for words segmentation. Meanwhile, an improved projection based method is also employed for baseline detection. The proposed method has been successfully tested on IFN/ENIT database consisting of 26459 Arabic words handwritten by 411 different writers, and the results were promising and very encouraging in more accurate detection of the baseline and segmentation of words for further recognition

A hypothesize-and-verify framework for Text Recognition using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks

Deep LSTM is an ideal candidate for text recognition. However text recognition involves some initial image processing steps like segmentation of lines and words which can induce error to the recognition system. Without segmentation, learning very long range context is difficult and becomes computationally intractable. Therefore, alternative soft decisions are needed at the pre-processing level. This paper proposes a hybrid text recognizer using a deep recurrent neural network with multiple layers of abstraction and long range context along with a language model to verify the performance of the deep neural network. In this paper we construct a multi-hypotheses tree architecture with candidate segments of line sequences from different segmentation algorithms at its different branches. The deep neural network is trained on perfectly segmented data and tests each of the candidate segments, generating unicode sequences. In the verification step, these unicode sequences are validated using a sub-string match with the language model and best first search is used to find the best possible combination of alternative hypothesis from the tree structure. Thus the verification framework using language models eliminates wrong segmentation outputs and filters recognition errors

Text Line Segmentation of Historical Documents: a Survey

There is a huge amount of historical documents in libraries and in various National Archives that have not been exploited electronically. Although automatic reading of complete pages remains, in most cases, a long-term objective, tasks such as word spotting, text/image alignment, authentication and extraction of specific fields are in use today. For all these tasks, a major step is document segmentation into text lines. Because of the low quality and the complexity of these documents (background noise, artifacts due to aging, interfering lines),automatic text line segmentation remains an open research field. The objective of this paper is to present a survey of existing methods, developed during the last decade, and dedicated to documents of historical interest.Comment: 25 pages, submitted version, To appear in International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, On line version available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/k2813176280456k3

Handwritten and Printed Text Separation in Real Document

The aim of the paper is to separate handwritten and printed text from a real document embedded with noise, graphics including annotations. Relying on run-length smoothing algorithm (RLSA), the extracted pseudo-lines and pseudo-words are used as basic blocks for classification. To handle this, a multi-class support vector machine (SVM) with Gaussian kernel performs a first labelling of each pseudo-word including the study of local neighbourhood. It then propagates the context between neighbours so that we can correct possible labelling errors. Considering running time complexity issue, we propose linear complexity methods where we use k-NN with constraint. When using a kd-tree, it is almost linearly proportional to the number of pseudo-words. The performance of our system is close to 90%, even when very small learning dataset where samples are basically composed of complex administrative documents.Comment: Machine Vision Applications (2013