An approach to extracting the target text line from a document image captured by a pen scanner

In this paper, we present a new approach to extracting the target text line from a document image captured by a pen scanner. Given the binary image, a set of possible text lines are first formed by nearest-neighbor grouping of connected components (CC). They are then refined by text line merging and adding the missed CCs. The possible target text line is identified by using a geometric feature based score function and fed to an OCR engine for character recognition. If the recognition result is confident enough, the target text line is accepted. Otherwise, all the remaining text lines are fed to the OCR engine to verify whether an alternative target text line exists or the whole image should be rejected. The effectiveness of the above approach is confirmed by experiments on a testing database consisting of 117 document images captured by C-Pen and ScanEye pen scanners.