Analysis of line structure in handwritten documents using the Hough transform

In the analysis of handwriting in documents a central task is that of determining line structure of the text, e.g., number of text lines, location of their starting and end-points, line-width, etc. While simple methods can handle ideal images, real world documents have complexities such as overlapping line structure, variable line spacing, line skew, document skew, noisy or degraded images etc. This paper explores the application of the Hough transform method to handwritten documents with the goal of automatically determining global document line structure in a top-down manner which can then be used in conjunction with a bottom-up method such as connected component analysis. The performance is significantly better than other top-down methods, such as the projection profile method. In addition, we evaluate the performance of skew analysis by the Hough transform on handwritten documents.