A System for Handwritten and Machine-Printed Text Separation in Bangla Document Images

In this paper, we describe an approach to distinguish between hand-written text and machine-printed text from annotated machine-printed Bangla Documents images. In applications involving OCR, distinction of machine-printed and hand-written characters is important, so that they can be sent to separate recognition engines. Identification of hand-written parts is useful in deleting those parts and cleaning the document image as well. In this paper a classification system is presented which takes a connected component in the document image and assigns them to two classes namely "machine-printed" and for "hand-written" classes, respectively. The proposed system contains a preprocessing step, which smoothes the object border and finds the Connected Component. Bangla script specific features are extracted from that Connected Component image, and a standard classifier based on SVM generates the final response. Experimental results on a data set show that the proposed approach achieves an overall accuracy of 96.49%.