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Text Line Extraction Using Fully Convolutional Network and Energy Minimization

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Pattern Recognition. ICPR International Workshops and Challenges (ICPR 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 12667))

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Abstract

Text lines are important parts of handwritten document images and easier to analyze by further applications. Despite recent progress in text line detection, text line extraction from a handwritten document remains an unsolved task. This paper proposes to use a fully convolutional network for text line detection and energy minimization for text line extraction. Detected text lines are represented by blob lines that strike through the text lines. These blob lines assist an energy function for text line extraction. The detection stage can locate arbitrarily oriented text lines. Furthermore, the extraction stage is capable of finding out the pixels of text lines with various heights and interline proximity independent of their orientations. Besides, it can finely split the touching and overlapping text lines without an orientation assumption. We evaluate the proposed method on VML-AHTE, VML-MOC, and Diva-HisDB datasets. The VML-AHTE dataset contains overlapping, touching and close text lines with rich diacritics. The VML-MOC dataset is very challenging by its multiply oriented and skewed text lines. The Diva-HisDB dataset exhibits distinct text line heights and touching text lines. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method despite various types of challenges, yet using the same parameters in all the experiments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~berat/data/ahte_dataset.

  2. 2.

    https://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~berat/data/moc_dataset.

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Gunes Cevik for annotating the ground truth. This work has been partially supported by the Frankel Center for Computer Science.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel

    Berat Kurar Barakat, Ahmad Droby, Reem Alaasam, Boraq Madi & Jihad El-Sana

  2. Shamoon College of Engineering, Ashdod, Israel

    Irina Rabaev

Authors
  1. Berat Kurar Barakat
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  2. Ahmad Droby
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  3. Reem Alaasam
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  4. Boraq Madi
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  5. Irina Rabaev
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  6. Jihad El-Sana
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Berat Kurar Barakat .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, University of Firenze, Firenze, Italy

    Alberto Del Bimbo

  2. Dipartimento di Ingegneria “Enzo Ferrari”, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

    Rita Cucchiara

  3. Department of Computer Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Stan Sclaroff

  4. Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, University of Catania, Catania, Italy

    Giovanni Maria Farinella

  5. Cloud & AI, JD.COM, Beijing, China

    Tao Mei

  6. Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, University of Firenze, Firenze, Italy

    Marco Bertini

  7. Computational Sciences Department, National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE), Tonantzintla, Puebla, Mexico

    Hugo Jair Escalante

  8. Dipartimento di Ingegneria “Enzo Ferrari”, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

    Roberto Vezzani

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Barakat, B.K., Droby, A., Alaasam, R., Madi, B., Rabaev, I., El-Sana, J. (2021). Text Line Extraction Using Fully Convolutional Network and Energy Minimization. In: Del Bimbo, A., et al. Pattern Recognition. ICPR International Workshops and Challenges. ICPR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12667. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68787-8_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68787-8_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-68786-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-68787-8

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