Fast and robust skew estimation of scanned documents through background area information

0167-8655/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.patrec.2010.03.016 * Correspondence to: G.D.C. Cavalcanti, Federal Univ of Informatics, Av. Prof. Luis Freire, Cidade Univers Brazil. Tel.: +55 81 2126 8430x4346; fax: +55 81 212 ** Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (A.A. Masca Cavalcanti), [email protected] (C.A.B. Mello). URL: http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~viisar (G.D.C. Cavalc Skew correction of scanned documents is a crucial step for document recognition systems. Due to the problem of high computational costs of the state-of-the-art methods, we present herein a variation of a parallelograms covering algorithm. This variation strongly reduces the computational time and works over noisy documents and documents containing non-textual elements, like: stamps, handwritten components and vertical bars. Experimental studies with different databases show that this variation overcomes well-known techniques, achieving better results over synthetic rotated documents and real scanned documents. 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.