A Technique for Skew Detection of Printed Arabic Documents

Document skew correction is one of the core preprocessing steps in document analysis systems. In this paper, the author proposes a new multi-step skew detection technique for printed Arabic documents. The technique exploits the unique property of the writing line of Arabic script and is based on connected component analysis and projection profiles. The proposed technique works for different types of Arabic documents having text and non-text zones with unrestricted layout. Moreover due to the multi-step approach, it can detect skews with the resolution of ± 0.05 degrees. Experiments conducted on different Arabic documents shows the effectiveness of the technique.