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Text line segmentation of historical documents: a survey

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Abstract

There is a huge amount of historical documents in libraries and in various National Archives that have not been exploited electronically. Although automatic reading of complete pages remains, in most cases, a long-term objective, tasks such as word spotting, text/image alignment, authentication and extraction of specific fields are in use today. For all these tasks, a major step is document segmentation into text lines. Because of the low quality and the complexity of these documents (background noise, artifacts due to aging, interfering lines), automatic text line segmentation remains an open research field. The objective of this paper is to present a survey of existing methods, developed during the last decade and dedicated to documents of historical interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GET-Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications/TSI and CNRS-LTCI, 46 rue Barrault, 75013, Paris, France

    Laurence Likforman-Sulem

  2. IUT, Université du Havre/GED, Place Robert Schuman, 76610, Le Havre, France

    Abderrazak Zahour & Bruno Taconet

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  1. Laurence Likforman-Sulem
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  2. Abderrazak Zahour
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  3. Bruno Taconet
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Correspondence to Laurence Likforman-Sulem.

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Likforman-Sulem, L., Zahour, A. & Taconet, B. Text line segmentation of historical documents: a survey. IJDAR 9, 123–138 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-006-0023-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-006-0023-z

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