Multi-script iterative steerable directional filtering for handwritten text line extraction

In this paper, we introduce an iterative method for handwritten text line extraction. The proposed method improves the steerable filter approach by introducing an iterative scheme that iterates lines detection for various configurations of the filters, thus making the method auto adaptable with different types of scripts. We tested the method on different handwritten text datasets, used during earlier competitions organized at ICDAR or ICFHR, and using the same evaluation protocol. The tests carried out on the Open-Hart data set for Arabic scripts, as well as three other Latin and Greek scripts, show that state of the art performance are obtained without tuning any parameters.