LINE REMOVAL AND CHARACTER RESTORATION USING BAG REPRESENTATION OF FORM IMAGES

Soo Hyung KIM, Seon H. JEON and Hee K. KWAG

Department of Computer Science, Chonnam National University
300 Yongbongdong, Bukgu, Kwagju, 500-757, Korea
E-mail: {shkim, swjong, hkkwag}@chonnam.chonnam.ac.kr}

This paper proposes a new algorithm for text/lines separation in forms processing. It can detect and remove various styles of horizontal lines, such as lines rotated up to ± 45, lines that are curved a little, dashed lines, lines with non-uniform thickness, and so on. After removing the line, it recovers character strokes distorted by the deleted lines. All the operations are performed efficiently with a BAG (Block Adjacency Graph) representation of the input binary image. An experiment with 200 samples, in which handwritten Korean characters are written on a guiding line, show a superiority of our algorithm - 96.5% accuracy and about 1 second of processing time per sample.

In: L.R.B. Schomaker and L.G. Vuurpijl (Eds.)
Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Frontiers
in Handwriting Recognition, September 11-13 2000, Amsterdam,
Nijmegen: International Unipen Foundation,
ISBN 90-76942-01-3
pp. 43-52.