Segmentation Based Recovery of Arbitrarily Warped Document Images

Non-linear warping appears in document images when captured by a digital camera or a scanner, especially in the case that these documents are digitized bounded volumes. Arbitrarily warped documents may have several slope changes along the text lines as well as along the words of the same text line. In this paper, a novel segmentation based technique for efficient restoration of arbitrarily warped document images is presented. The proposed technique recovers the documents relying upon (i) text lines and words detection using a novel segmentation technique appropriate for warped documents, (ii) a first draft binary image de-warping based on word rotation and translation according to upper and lower word baselines, and (Hi) a recovery of the original warped image guided by the draft binary image de-warping result. Experimental results on several arbitrarily warped documents prove the effectiveness of the proposed technique.