Ruling lines removal in handwritten documents

In this paper, we present a method for removing ruling lines from handwritten documents, making no damage to the existing characters. It is argued that ruling lines have a predictable position in the page, but their thickness and the distance between them may differ from one document to another, which is estimated with simple algorithm. Another important challenge in this regard is detecting the edge of the line. In this paper the two columns that best represent edge of the main lines are considered. Compare to other methods, our method, which has been tested on six languages, that is English, French, German, Greek, Arabic and Persian, displays reduced time in the computation of rule-line removal and higher performance.