Segmentation of horizontally overlapping lines in printed indian scripts

Horizontally overlapping lines are normally found in printed newspapers of any Indian script. Along with these overlapping lines few other broken components of a line (strip) having text less than a complete line are also found in text. The horizontally overlapping lines and other strips make it very difficult to estimate the boundary of a line leading to incorrect line segmentation. Incorrect line segmentation decreases the recognition accuracy. In this paper we have proposed a solution for segmenting horizontally overlapping lines and solved the problem of other strips in eight most widely used printed Indian scripts. Whole document has been divided into strips and proposed algorithm has been applied for segmenting horizontally overlapping lines and associating small strips to their respective lines. The algorithm has shown approximately 96.45–99.79% accuracy depending upon script. We have also tried to segment horizontally overlapping lines, containing different sized text, i.e. the newspaper articles in which bigger sized heading lines overlaps with normal sized text lines.