Coupled Snakelet Model for Curled Textline Segmentation of Camera-Captured Document Images

Detection of curled textline is important for dewarping of hand-held camera-captured document images. Then baselines and the lines following the top of x-height of characters (x-lines) are estimated for dewarping. Existing curled textline segmentation approaches are sensitive to outlier points and perspective distortions. Furthermore these approaches use regression over top and bottom points of a segmented textline to estimate its x-line and baseline separately, which may results in inaccurate estimation. Here we propose a novel curled textline segmentation approach based on active contours (snakes) in which we perform segmentation by estimating the pairs of x-line and baseline; solving both problems together. Starting form a connected component we jointly trace a pair of x-line and baseline using coupled snakes and external energies of neighboring top-bottom points. We grow neighborhood region iteratively during tracing, which results in robustness to perspective distortions, and mai...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICDAR
• Authors: Syed Saqib Bukhari, Faisal Shafait, Thomas M. Breuel
• Keywords: Document Analysis, Document Image, ICDAR 2009, Outlier Points, Textline Segmentation