Document skew detection based on the fractal and least squares method

In this paper, a simple and robust algorithm is presented to detect skew in a totally unconstrained document. It can discover the skew angle not only in the whole page of document but also in different document blocks which have their different skew angles. This method consists of four major phases, namely: (a) skew detection and correction for whole page; (b) segmentation of document into blocks; (c) identification of skewed text blocks, and (d) skew detection and correction for the skewed text blocks. To detect the skew in a document, the saw-tooth algorithm and least squares method are used. To segment a document into blocks, the fractal approach is applied. Promising experimental results are also provided to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method