Graph based line segmentation on cluttered handwritten manuscripts

We propose a two phase line segmentation method for handwritten pre-modern densely written manuscripts. The proposed method combines the robustness of projection based methods with the flexibility of graph based methods. The result are cut-outs of the image containing each text line. Overlapping characters, help lines and degradation can create foreground elements spanning several lines that are hard to separate. We treat the problem of finding a cut through the text line separation as a graph optimization problem, which allows for flexible separation of entangled components. The proposed method has been tested on two medieval sources with satisfying results. A comparison to similar methods, using standard metrics, is presented.