Line extraction and stroke ordering of text pages

A method is developed to extract lines from pages of handwritten text by finding the shortest spanning tree of a graph formed from the set of main strokes. Main strokes of extracted lines are arranged in the same order as they were written by following the path in which they are contained. Then, every secondary stroke is assigned to the closest main stroke. At the end, an ordered list of main strokes each with the corresponding number of assigned secondary strokes is obtained. Each combination of main-secondary strokes can be the input to a subsequent recognition stage. The method is more suited to variable handwriting.