Robust Page Segmentation Based on Smearing and Error Correction Unifying Top-down and Bottom-up Approaches

In this paper we present a robust multi-pass page segmentation algorithm. The first pass uses a modified smearing algorithm and the second pass performs a hybrid of bottom-up and top-down segmentation on the output of the first pass. Unlike traditional approaches, the bottom-up and top-down steps are based on primitive results of a smearing based page segmentation algorithm. Therefore, "split" and "merge" processes start with text blocks that are mostly true text blocks but a few of them are either touching or broken. We present experimental results on newspaper and journal documents from different languages to demonstrate the robustness and language independence of our approach.