Application of the wavelet and the Hough transform for detecting the skew angle in Arabic printed documents

The purpose of this work is to present a new technique for detecting the skew angle based on wavelet transform analysis (WT) and Hough transform (HT). The application concerns the Arabic document images. The application of the Hough transform presents a good solution for skew angle detection. However, this approach requires an important memory space and high computing time. For this, we have suggested the using of the WT in order to reduce the number of points and the computing time. This technique is based principally on the high band frequency of the wavelet transform. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, a test of 100 different documents was used. Obtained result indicates that the suggested approach gave good performance, the accuracy results of the skew angle estimation is very good and the computing time is well decreases compared to the alternative methods. The technique has been applied for Arabic image document, but it can be generalized for any documents.