Text Line Segmentation in Historical Newspapers
21th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing (ICAISC 2022) (2022)
Abstract
This paper deals with page segmentation into individual text lines used as an input of a line-based OCR system. This task is usually solved in one step which directly identifies text lines in whole documents. However, a direct approach may jeopardize the reading order of the lines and thus deteriorate the overall transcription result. We propose a novel approach which decomposes this problem into two steps: text-block and text-line segmentation. The particular tasks are handled by algorithms based on fully convolutional neural networks. The proposed method is evaluated on two standard corpora, Europeana and RDCL 2019, and on a novel dataset created from data available in Porta fontium portal. This dataset is freely available for research purposes.
