Text Line Segmentation for Gray Scale Historical

Document Images
Abedelkadir Asi1 Raid Saabni2,3 Jihad El-Sana1
1

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel

2
Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel
3
TRDC, Kafr Qarea, Israel

{abedas,saabni,el-sana}@cs.bgu.ac.il
ABSTRACT
In this paper we present a new approach for text line segmentation that works directly on gray-scale document images.
Our algorithm constructs distance transform directly on the
gray-scale images, which is used to compute two types of
seams: medial seams and separating seams. A medial seam
is a chain of pixels that crosses the text area of a text line
and a separating seam is a path that passes between two consecutive rows. The medial seam determines a text line and
the separating seams define the upper and lower boundaries
of the text line. The medial and separating seams propagate
according to energy maps, which are defined based on the
constructed distance transform. We have performed various experimental results on different datasets and received
encouraging results.

Keywords
Seam Carving, Line Extraction, Multilingual, Signed Distance Transform, Dynamic programming, Handwriting

1.

INTRODUCTION

Historical handwritten documents are valuable cultural heritage, as they provide insights into both tangible and intangible cultural aspects from the past. The need to preserve
these documents demands global emerging efforts to analyze
and manipulate them by utilizing techniques from various
science fields. Handwritten historical documents pose real
challenges for automatic processing, such as image binarization, writer identification, page segmentation, and keyword
searching and indexing. A considerable number of algorithms address these tasks; some provide acceptable results
and already integrated into working systems.
Document image segmentation into text lines is a major
prerequisite procedure for various document image analysis
tasks, such as word spotting, key-word searching, and text
alignment [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Extracting text lines from handwritten document images poses different challenges than those
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in machine-printed documents [7]. These challenges can be

related roughly to two main factors: writing style and image
quality. Writing styles differs among writers and give rise to
various text-line segmentation difficulties. Baseline fluctuation due to pin movement, and as a result the baseline may
be straight, sequence of straight segments, or curved. Variability in skew among different text lines is a real challenge
that complicates the extraction process. Crowded writing
styles muddle text line boundaries as interlines spaces become narrow and increase the overlap of components bouding boxes among adjacent text lines. The presence of touching components from two adjacent text lines poses an obstacle for both text line segmentation approaches; those that
search for separating lines and those that search for aligned
physical units. Punctuation and diacritic symbols, which
are located in-between text lines, complicate the deciphering
process of the physical structure of handwritten text lines.
Historical document images are usually of low quality due
to aging, frequent handling, and storage conditions. They
often include various types of noise, such as holes, spots,
broken strokes, which may entangle the extraction process
and produce binarization errors once binarization is applied.
Several text-line extraction algorithms for handwritten documents have been proposed (see Section 2). Saabni and ElSana [8] presented an interesting line extraction algorithm,
which is based on the seam carving technique introduced
by Avidan and Shamir [9]. Their algorithm is limited to
binary images and as a result it inherits the limitations of
image binarization, which introduce noise and various artifacts. Preprocessing and post-processing steps were introduced to determine text line boundaries, cope with touching/overlapping components, and collect additional strokes.
In this paper, we built upon their work and developed a robust line extraction algorithm that works directly on grayscale images and overcomes the limitations mentioned above.
Our algorithm constructs distance transform directly on the
gray-scale images and computes medial seams and separating seams, which determine the text lines in a document
image (see Figure 1). The medial seam determines the middle of the text row and the separating seams, which are
generated with respect to a medial seam, define the upper
and lower boundaries of the text line. The medial and separating seams propagate according to different energy maps,
which are defined based on the constructed distance transform. The inability to determine the boundaries of text lines
forces Saabni and El-Sana [8] to recompute the energy map

(a)

(b)

segment text-line in document images [23, 24, 25, 26, 27,

28, 29]. These approaches are applied to binary images,
as they often require the isolation of basic elements, such
as strokes and connected components. Level-set techniques
are applied to extract text lines and handle multiple orientations, touching, and overlapping characters [5, 30]. A
painting technique is employed to smear the foreground of
the document image and enhance the separability between
the foreground and background to simplify the detection of
text-lines [31]. Dynamic programming is used to determine
text lines through computing minimum cost paths between
consecutive text lines [32].

3.
(c)

(d)
Figure 1: Algorithm flow: (a) the seam-map, (b)
medial seam (blue) and seam fragments (green and
red), (c) seam seeds (green and red), and (d) medial
seam and separating seams.
for the entire page image after the extraction of each text
line. The separating seams determine the text line boundaries, define the region to be updated, and overcome the
limitation of recomputing the energy map.
In the rest of this paper we briefly review related work, describe our approach in detail, and report experimental results. Finally we conclude and discuss directions for future
work.

2.

RELATED WORK

Determining the text lines of a document image is a basic procedure for various document processing applications
and have received tremendous attention over the last several
decades.
Image smearing was among the earliest approaches used to
determine text lines; Wong et al. [10] applied image smearing
to binarized printed document images and Bar-Yosef et al. [11]
used it for historical documents. Projection profiles along
a predetermined direction is used in top-down approaches
to estimate the paths separating consecutive text lines [12,
13, 14, 11, 15, 16]. Adaptive local projection profiles is employed to handle multi-skew in document images [11, 17].
Hough transform is used to compute the direction to apply projection profile; and to generate good text line hypotheses [18, 19]. Fuzzy run length matrices and adaptive
local connectivity maps are applied directly to the gray-scale
document images [20, 4, 21]. Tracking minima points to
follow the white-most and black-most pixels along horizontal paths are used to estimate the boundaries and baselines
of text lines [22]. Seam carving approach is used to find
the seams, which resemble the baseline of text row, using
a signed-distance-transform based energy map [8]. Various
grouping techniques, such as heuristic rules, learning algorithms, nearest neighbor, and search trees are applied to

OUR APPROACH

Humans tend to perceive text line patterns by tracking the

concentration of ink along lines without actually reading the
written text. Spaces between text lines play a major role in
perceiving the layout of text lines despite the existence of
touching/overlapping components, which are usually sparse
and rarely disrupt the human text line recognition. These
observations motivated the development of our approach,
which find the medial seams that determine the text line
and the two seams that separate it from its previous and
next text lines.
We build upon the approach proposed by Saabni and ElSana [8], which applies distance transform to binary images
to generate energy maps; and then computes the minimal energy seams, which crosses the components along text lines.
Connected components labeling in binary document images
is a crucial step in their algorithm. Our approach works
directly on the gray-scale images and it does not require
binarizing the image neither labeling the components. It
extracts a stripe that resembles the text line directly from
the the gray-scale image, which eliminates the need for postprocessing to determine the components of the text line that
do not intersect the computed seam. In addition, separating
seams naturally cope with overlapping components during
seam propagation. Saabni and El-Sana [8] recompute the
energy map for the entire page after the extraction of each
text line, because of the inability to bound the influence of
the extracted text line. In contrast, our approach locally
updates the energy map to cancel the influence of the extracted lines region, and thus saves recomputing the energy
map.
Next we discuss in detail the two main steps of the line extraction procedure: constructing the energy maps and computing seams.

3.1

Energy Map

The search for a chain of pixels that either passes across

a text line (i.e., the medial seam) or lies as far as possible
from text lines (i.e., separating seam) calls for an energy
function that provide a sufficient distance measure. The
distance transform was adopted to generate the energy map,
where local minimum points determine medial seams and
maximum points define the separating seams.
To determine a seam that passes along the medial axis of
a text line and crosses its components, we use an energy
map based on a gray-level distance transform, introduced
by Levi and Montanari [33]. Gray-level distance transform

is defined as modified geodesic distances; i.e., the distance

between pixels p and q is the minimum of the lengths of the
paths [p = p0 , p1 , ..., pn = q]. The length of the path, l(p), is
defined by Equation 1, where f is a distance and d(pi , pi+1 )
corresponds to the slope between two consecutive pixels.

l(p) =

n1
X

f (d(pi , pi+1 ), I(pi ), I(pi+1 ))

(1)

which forces the medial seam to propagate along the text

lines, as shown in Figure 2(b).

(a)

(b)

i=0

Toivanen [34] developed the distance transform on curved

space (DTOCS) and the weighted distance transform on
curved space, where the distance metric is defined as difference between the gray values of the pixels along the minimal
path; i.e., d(pi , pi+1 ) = |I(pi ) I(pi+1 )| + 1.
The Gray-level Distance Transform(GDT) assigns values to
pixels according to their distance from the nearest minimal
points (reference points). In contrast to binary document
images, paths between components pixels and background
pixels in gray-scale images are curved and not straight lines,
as the straight lines between two pixels can be blocked by
obstacles consisting of higher or lower gray-values.
The distance transform of noisy document images may include small fluctuation that influence seam generation. To
overcome this limitation, we apply Gaussian filter to smooth
the image before generating the distance transform.

3.2

3.2.2 Separating Seams

The separating seams define the upper and lower boundaries
of text lines; i.e., determine the text strip, which is necessary
to assign in-between component to the right text lines and
accurately determine the pixels that need to be updated in
the seam-map to avoid recomputing the seam-map after each
line extraction. Separating seams of a text line are generated
with respect to the medial seam of their text line.
Seam seeds are defined with respect to a medial seam as
the global maxima (on the Gray-scale Distance Transform)
along the vertical segment connecting two consecutive medial seams. Separating seams are grown from seam seeds
toward the two sides of a page image (left and right). However, the need to determine the separating seams of a medial
seam before determining its neighboring medial seams complicates computing the seam seeds.

Seam Generation

Seams are computed using dynamic programming which relies on generating an energy map that encodes the minimal
cost of the valid paths. We refer to this energy map as the
seam-map, which is computed similar to [8] with slight modification to generate salient line structure. We replace the
equal weights for the horizontal and diagonal distances by
different weights that reflects the actual distance on the image (see Equation 2, where w0 = 1 and w1 = w1 = 12 ).
We found that this modification generates accurate energy
maps and produce robust seams. The algorithm determines
the minimal cost path by starting with the minimal cost on
the last column (right column) and traversing the seam-map
backward from right to left.

map[i, j] =

3.2.1

Figure 2: Medial seam generation using (a) one pass,

(b) two passes.

2GDT (i, j) + min1l=1 (wl map[i + l, j 1])

(2)

Medial Seam

We noticed that computing the seam-map in one pass as

shown above generates a seam-map which rows are more
salient on the right side than on the left side, as shown in
Figure 3(b). The weak seam-map on the left side allows
the medial seam to jump to adjacent lines as shown in Figure 2(a). To improve the saliency of the rows and retain the
seam on the medial of text lines, we construct the seam map
using two passes from left-to-right and from right-to-left
and then bi-linearly interpolate the resulting two seam maps
into the final seam-map, as shown in Figure 3(d). In this
scheme, the generated seam-map is well-defined along text
lines and faithfully resembles their structure (see Figure 3),

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 3: Seam-map generation: (a)original image,

(b)left-to-right, (c)right-to-left seams, and (d)the interpolated final seam-map.
To generate the seam seeds for a medial seam, sm , from each
pixel, px on the medial seam we search for the maximum
points on its lower and upper sides along the column including px . The absence of the adjacent medial seams makes
it hard to distinguish between local and global maximum
points. To resolve such dilemma, for each suspected maximum point, pmax , we proceed searching until we reach the
first minimum point, pmin . If pmin is connected through a
minima path (valley) to the starting seam, sm , then pmax is
a local maximum, which belongs to the processes seam, and
there is a need to continue searching for another maximum
point, otherwise pmax is considered a global maximum (an
in-between-lines point). To verify that pmin does not belong

to the seam sm , we extend pmin along minimal points with

respect to the GDT map and test whether the extended path
reaches the processed medial seam, sm , or not. If the path
returns to the sm , then pmin belongs to the processed seam
sm , otherwise it is not. Since local minima cannot be completely avoided, a noncontinuous seams that consists of separated short seams, which are denoted seam fragments, are
generated (see Figure 1). Erroneous fragments are filtered
out based one the length of the fragment and its distance
from the medial seam.
Short fragments are not reliable, as they may indicate local
minima with respect to the segment between the two medial seams. Therefore, seam fragments are sorted in ascending order according to their length and the fragments in the
lower fraction are filtered out (in current implementation we
ignore the lower half). For each of the remaining fragment
we associate a certainty value, certainty(f, s), which aims to
resemble the probability of a seam fragment to coincide with
the corresponding separating seam. The certainty value is
the sum of the distances of fragment pixels from the medial
seam, as shown in Equation 3, where fs and fe are the first
and the last column of the fragment f , and ms is its corresponding medial seam. We sort the remaining fragments
according to their certainty value in a descending order and
ignore the lower fraction (in our current implementation we
ignore the lower half).

certainty(f, ms) =

fe
X

|(ms(i) f (i))|

(a)

(b)

Figure 4: Spring model: (a) the medial seam (blue)

and a possible separating seam (red), (b) the resulting separating seam after applying spring force.

the seam (see Figure 4). The spring factor k was determined
experimentally, and we have found out that we need small
values of k, usually 1/dr .

(3)

i=fs

The fragments with the highest certainty values form the

seed candidate set. We extend each seed candidate to the
left and right sides of the page image, by propagating the
seam along the maximal points of the GDT map. We then
prioritize the candidates based on the number of fragments
each extended seam passes through. The candidate with the
maximal priority is taken as the seam seed. Note that we
select two seam seeds one below the medial seam and one
above it.

3.2.3

Seam Propagation

Growing a seam seed into a separating seam should maintain an appropriate distance from the corresponding medial
seam. The separating seam is guided by the GDT map,
which is computed based on the topography (gray levels) of
the image. The fork of ridges leads to the existence of separating seams with small differences in their weights, where
the maximal-weight seam may not be the sought seam (see
Figure 5). To overcome this limitation we incorporate the
distance from the medial seam into the propagation scheme
of the separating seam by integrating a spring model within
the seam prorogation scheme. The applied force of the
spring model is used as a weight in the propagation scheme;
i.e., F = k(|dr d|), where dr and d are the rest distance
and the distance from the medial seam, respectively, and k
is the spring constant. The rest distance is the average distance between the medial seam and the currently computed
separating seam. This scheme pushes the separating seam
away from the medial seam, when it is too close and attracts
the seam toward the medial seam when it moves aways from

Figure 5: A document image and its distance transform, where two fork examples are marked with red
rectangles.

4.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

Several evaluation methods for line extraction algorithms

have been proposed in the literature. Some, evaluate the
results manually, while others use predefined line areas to
count misclassified pixels. Since the proposed approach works
directly on gray-scale images and it is not possible to rely on
connected components for automatic evaluation, the experimental results were evaluated manually. The correctness of
an extracted text line is evaluated based on its three seams:
the medial and the two separating seams. The medial seam
is expected to go through the middle of the same text line
the ink (dark) area. The fraction of a medial seam that goes
between text lines or jump to another text line is defined
as faulty. Similarly, a separating seam is expected to go between the lines and faulty fractions go through (or touch)
text area or jump to another in-between area. We measure
the correctness, correctness(s), of a seam s as the ratio of
the correct fractions; i.e., the ratio of the sum of pixels in
the correct fractions to the line width in pixels. We measure
the correctness of an extracted text line, l, using Equation 4,
where medial(l), upper(l), and lower(l) are the medial, upper, and lower seams of the text line l. Equation 4 return
a value in the range [0.0, , 1.0], 1 for perfectly extracted
lines and 0 for completely wrong extraction.

correctness(medial(l))
2
correctness(upper(l))
+
4
correctness(lower(l))
+
4

DataSet
Wadod
Al-Majid
AUB
Congress L.

correctness(l) =

(4)

Equation 4 nicely measure the correctness of a text line, but

underestimates the intersection of a separating seam with a
descender or ascender, as it usually occupy a small number of
pixels. Therefore, we count the number of such intersection
for each line and measure the percentage of such intersection
separately, as shown in Table 1.

Medial
99
98
96
95

Correctness(%)
Upper Lower
97
97
96
97
95
94
93
94

Line
98
97
95
94.2

Stroke (%)
Crossing
9
2
9
11

Table 1: The performance of our algorithm on various dataset written in different languages.
Our approach enables the separating seams to split touching components along the path passing between the lines
and separate them, not necessarily on the optimal position.
This procedure may split fractions of bracket-shape ascenders or descenders that besiege the propagating seam and
force it to pass through, as shown in Figure 7. Nevertheless,
it is easy to fix this in a post-processing procedure that examines the cases where the separating seam passes through
local minima. Propagating along local minima path usually
reveals whether the crossed shape was a touching component, ascender, or descender.

Figure 7: The last word on the second line(right-toleft), descender besieges the propagating seam and
force it to pass through.

Figure 6: Random samples from the tested document images: Arabic, English and Spanish.
The absence of publicly availability database for evaluating line extraction algorithm on gray-scale images drove the
development of our own dataset, which consist of various
historical manuscripts in different languages. We have evaluated our system using 97 Arabic pages (900 lines) from
Juma Al-Majid Center for Culture and Heritage [35], 70
pages (1050 lines) from Wadod Center for Manuscripts [36],
40 pages (420 lines) from a 19th-century master thesis collection in the American University of Beirut(AUB) [37] and
10 pages (150 lines) from Thomas Jefferson manuscripts located at the Congress Libray. Our dataset includes Arabic, English, and Spanish handwritten document images.
The images have been selected to have multi-skew, touching/ overlapping components and both regular and irregular
spacing between lines.
Table 1 shows the average performance of our algorithm using various datasets of different qualities. Figure 6 presents
samples from the tested datasets. As can be seen, it performs well independent of the used script and manages to
generate very good results for languages that include delayed
strokes, dots, and diacritics.

In languages that include many dots and diacritics, such as

Arabic, hand-writers may not respect the closeness rule and
place dots or diacritics closer to the above or below text line.
Our algorithm may fail to detect such a case, as it requires
recognizing the written text to determine for which text line
those dots or diacritics belong. However, it is noticeable that
even for a human it is not easy to assign the misclassified
diacritics to the adequate text line without reading the text.
Zhixin et al. [4] presented an interesting approach for text
line segmentation on gray scale images. They adaptively
binarize the local connectivity map to focus on the line locations and superimposed the binarized ALCM on a binary
version of the original document image to collect components that touch the line patterns. Their approach still requires adaptive binarization for component extraction and
labeling, whereas our approach is binarazation-free and does
not include any component labeling step. We also used documents from the Congress Library to test our approach, but
since their documents were randomly selected for testing, it
is not easy to provide accurate comparison.

5.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

We presented a language independent approach for text line

segmentation for gray-scale images. Our approach constructs
an energy map directly on the gray-scale document image;
and then computes a medial seam and separating seams for

each text line. A medial seam passes along the presumed

text lines and the separating seams define the upper and
lower boundaries of the text line.
[9]
Our approach avoids applying image binarization, which introduces noise and various artifacts. It also does not extract
connected components and does not need to deal with text
fragmentation. Instead, it directly computes the distance
transform on the gray-scale images. Determining the boundary of text line enables updating the seam-map locally, and
hence saves recomputing the seam-map and distance transform for the entire image after each text line extraction.
We see the scope on future work on extending this approach
to determine the page layout and the component of a text
line directly on gray-sale document images.

6.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This research was supported in part by the Israel Science

Foundation grant no. 1266/09, DFG-Trilateral Grant no.
8716, the Lynn and William Frankel Center for Computer
Sciences at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. We would like to
thank the reviewers for their insightful comments which led
to several improvements in the presentation of this paper.

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

[14]

[15]

7.

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