An Efficient Word Segmentation Technique for Historical and Degraded Machine-Printed Documents

Word segmentation is a crucial step for segmentation-free document analysis systems and is used for creating an index based on word matching. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for word segmentation in historical and degraded machine-printed documents. The proposed technique faces problems such as having text of different size, having text and non-text areas lying very near and having non-straight and warped text lines. It is based on: (i) a dynamic run length smoothing algorithm that helps grouping together homogeneous text regions, (ii) noise and punctuation marks removal as well as on obstacle detection in order to facilitate the segmentation process and (iv) a draft text line estimation procedure that guides the final word segmentation result. After testing on numerous historical and degraded machine-printed documents, it has turned out that our methodology performs better compared to current state-of-the-art word segmentation techniques for historical and degraded machine-printed documents.