Robust Document Warping with Interpolated Vector Fields

This paper describes a new versatile algorithm for correcting nonlinear distortions, such as curvature of book pages, in camera based document processing. We introduce the idea of using local orientation features to interpolate a vector field from which a warping mesh is derived. Ultimately, the image is corrected by approximating the nonlinear distortion with multiple linear projections. Since the algorithm does not derive the mesh directly from text baselines it is robust over arbitrarily complex text layouts. We describe a baseline detector for extracting the required local orientation features. We also sketch a method for correcting nonlinear distortions of a document’s vertical axis with our algorithm.