Script-independent, HMM-based text line finding for OCR

We present a new, script-independent, HMM-based technique to locate text lines on images containing one or more paragraphs of simple-column text. The parameters of the HMMs are trained online on each image using an unsupervised training procedure. We present results of line finding experiments in Arabic, Chinese and English to demonstrate the performance as well as the script-independent nature of the technique. A comparison of the HMM-based line finding with the manual line finding shows that the use of HMM-based technique does not lead to a significant increase in the recognition error rate