A New Method for Curvilinear Text line Extraction and
Straightening of Arabic Handwritten Text
Ayman Al Dmour1, Ibrahim El rube'2,
and Laiali Almazaydeh1
1Faculty of Information Technology,
Al-Hussein Bin Talal University, Jordan
2Department of Computer Engineering, Taif
University, KSA
Abstract: Line extraction is a
critical step from one of the main subtasks of Document Image Analysis, which
is layout analysis. This paper presents a new method for curvilinear text line
extraction and straightening in Arabic handwritten documents. The proposed
method is based on a strategy that consists of two distinct steps. First, text
line is extracted based on morphological dilation operation. Secondly, the
extracted text line is straighten in two sub-steps: Course tuning of text line
orientation based on Hough transform, then fine tuning based on centroid
alignment of the connected component that forms the text line. The proposed
approach has been extensively experimented on samples from the benchmark
datasets of KFUPM Handwritten Arabic TexT (KHATT) and Arabic Handwriting
DataBase (AHDB). Experimental results show that, the proposed method is capable
of detecting and straightening curvilinear text lines even on challenging
Arabic handwritten documents.
Keywords: Document image analysis, arabic handwriting, text
line extraction, hough transform.
Received January 14, 2016; accepted May 11, 2016