A New Method for Curvilinear Text line Extraction and Straightening of Arabic Handwritten Text

Line extraction is a critical step from one of the main subtasks of Document Image Analysis, which is layout analysis. This paper presents a new method for curvilinear text line extraction and straightening in Arabic handwritten documents. The proposed method is based on a strategy that consists of two distinct steps. First, text line is extracted based on morphological dilation operation. Secondly, the extracted text line is straighten in two sub-steps: Course tuning of text line orientation based on Hough transform, then fine tuning based on centroid alignment of the connected component that forms the text line. The proposed approach has been extensively experimented on samples from the benchmark datasets of KFUPM Handwritten Arabic TexT (KHATT) and Arabic Handwriting DataBase (AHDB). Experimental results show that, the proposed method is capable of detecting and straightening curvilinear text lines even on challenging Arabic handwritten documents