A discriminative learning approach for orientation detection of Urdu document images

Orientation detection is an important preprocessing step for accurate recognition of text from document images. Many existing orientation detection techniques are based on the fact that in Roman script text ascenders occur more likely than descenders, but this approach is not applicable to document of other scripts like Urdu, Arabic, etc. In this paper, we propose a discriminative learning approach for orientation detection of Urdu documents with varying layouts and fonts. The main advantage of our approach is that it can be applied to documents of other scripts easily and accurately. Our approach is based on classification of individual connected component orientation in the document image, and then the orientation of the page image is determined via majority count. A convolutional neural network is trained as discriminative learning model for the labeled Urdu books dataset with four target orientations: 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on dataset of Urdu documents categorized into the layouts of book, novel and poetry. We achieved 100% orientation detection accuracy on a test set of 328 document images.