Repulsive attractive network for baseline extraction on document images

This paper describes a new framework, called repulsive attractive (RA) network for baseline extraction on document images. The RA network is a self organizing feature detector which interacts with the document text image through the attractive and repulsive forces defined among the network components and the document image. Experimental results indicate that the network can successfully extract the baselines under heavy noise and with overlaps between the ascending and descending portions of the characters of adjacent lines. The proposed method is also applicable to a wide range of image processing applications, such as curve fitting, segmentation and thinning.