Graph Based Line Segmentation on Cluttered Handwritten Manuscripts

We propose a two phase line segmentationmethod for handwritten pre-modern densely writ-ten manuscripts. The proposed method combinesthe robustness of projection based methods withthe flexibility of graph based methods. The resultare cut-outs of the image containing each text line.Overlapping characters, help lines and degradationcan create foreground elements spanning several linesthat are hard to separate. We treat the problem offinding a cut through the text line separation as agraph optimization problem, which allows for flexibleseparation of entangled components.The proposed method has been tested on two me-dieval sources with satisfying results. A comparison tosimilar methods, using standard metrics, is presented