Multi-Oriented English Text Line Extraction Using Background and Foreground Information

In graphical documents (map, engineering drawing), artistic documents etc. there exist many printed materials where text lines are not parallel to each other and they are multi-oriented and curve in nature. For the OCR of such documents we need to extract individual text lines from the documents. Extraction of individual text lines from multi-oriented and/or curved text document is a difficult problem. In this paper, we propose a novel method to extract individual text lines from such document pages and the method is based on the foreground and background information of the characters of the text. To take care of background information, water reservoir concept is used here. In the proposed scheme at first, individual components are detected and grouped into 3-character clusters using their inter-component distance, size and positional information. Applying concept of graph, initial 3-character clusters are merged to have larger cluster group. Using inter-character background information, orientations of the extreme characters of a larger cluster are decided and based on these orientation, two candidate regions are formed from the cluster. Finally, with the help of these candidate regions, individual lines are extracted. From the experiment, we obtained encouraging result.