THE SEGMENTATION OF A TEXT LINE FOR A HANDWRITTEN UNCONSTRAINED DOCUMENT USING THINING ALGORITHM

For printed documents, the projection analysis of black pixels is widely used for the segmentation of a text line. However, for handwritten documents, we think that the projection analysis is not appropriate, as the separating border line of a text line is not a straight line on a paper with no ruled line. We will extract a curved separating border line. In this paper, we propose the new segmentation of a text line from a handwritten document image using a thinning algorithm. In most documents, a text line is separated by a background region for the reader to detect easily. From this point of view we use a new thinning algorithm for the background region to detect the separating border lines. In the thinned objects, the useless chains for the border line are eliminated by gradual conditions. To confirm the usefulness of this method, we applied it to 475 text lines in 22 handwritten documents as test images and an accuracy of 90.0% is obtained