Text Line Segmentation for Handwritten Documents Using Constrained Seam Carving

This paper proposes a language-independent method for segmenting text lines from handwritten document images. Our method is based on the seam carving, which has been already used for text line segmentation, but in order to tolerate multi-skewed text lines even in the same document image, we propose a constrained seam carving method, which can constrain energy to be passed along the connected components in the same text line as much as possible. Moreover, our proposed method tries to extract all the text lines by computing the energy map only once. In the experiments, our method is tested on the Greek, English and Indian document images, and get 98.41% FM score.