A Hough based algorithm for extracting text lines in handwritten documents

The method herein proposed detects text lines on handwritten pages which may include either lines oriented in several directions, erasures, or annotations between main lines. The method has a hypothesis-validation strategy which is iteratively activated until the end of the segmentation is reached. At each stage of the process, the best text-line hypothesis is generated in the Hough domain. taking into account the fluctuations of the text-line components. Afterwards, the validity of the line is checked in the image domain using a proximity criteria which analyses the context in which is perceived the alignment hypothesed. Ambiguous components belonging to several text lines are also marked.