An Enhanced Algorithm for Character Segmentation in Document
Image Processing
1
V. Manikandan, 1V.Venkatachalam, 1M.Kirthiga, 1K.Harini, 2N.Devarajan
Abstract--- Optical Character Recognition
consists of various steps like skew detection,
segmentation of columns, lines, words, and
characters before feeding the isolated
character to an optical character recognition
system. Several methodologies are followed to
perform these steps using conventional Hough
Transformation. In this paper, a new
algorithm is proposed to perform all those
steps involved in document image processing.
The algorithm is implemented for skew
detection, column and line segmentation and
Character Segmentation. This can be
extended to all other steps like character
recognition. The novelty of this approach lies
in “the consideration of any image, as one
formed by several black and white lines of
various lengths and at various angles”. The
pixel values of the binary image are stored in
an array. All the pixel values in the array are
compared with their horizontally adjacent
pixel values, row by row, for the presence of
collinear points (i.e., a line). It is done by
detecting the continuity of either the white or
black pixels accordingly. Once the continuity
is detected, the starting and end co-ordinates
are displayed as an intermediate result. A new
image will be generated as a result, which
indicates the pixel area of line, identified from
the input image. The algorithm is applied for
English and other regional languages.
I. INTRODUCTION
Document image analysis are the analysis of text
and graphics in an image, so that they can be
understood by a machine for further processing
or taking some steps based on them. In the
analysis of text regions of an image, there are
some tasks to be performed, namely, skew
detection, which is necessary as there are human
errors in scanning a document, column
segmentation of documents with multiple
1
The authors are with Department of Electrical and
Electronics Engineering, Coimbatore Institute of
Technology, Coimbatore -641 014, India.
2
The author is with Department of Electrical and
Electronics Engineering, Government College of
Technology, Coimbatore -641 013, India.
Corresponding author: manikandan@cit.edu.in
errors in scanning a document, column
segmentation of documents with multiple
columns, paragraph segmentation, line
segmentation, word segmentation and finally
Optical Character Recognition [1].
A scanned digital document image can be
considered as an image with collinear black dots
in a white background to form black and white
digital lines of various lengths. By proper
interpretation of these digital lines, the document
image analysis can be done successfully. The
preprocessing steps involved in document image
analysis are(i)Rule line removal (ii)Text
segmentation (iii)Word segmentation.
II. PREVIOUS METHOD
Detecting straight lines in a document image
involves detection of groups of collinear black
points. By proper interpretation of these digital
lines, one can successfully analyze the layout of
a document image. Detection of skew angle as
well as individual text lines is also helpful by
this process. PVC Hough [3] did propose an
interesting procedure for detecting lines in an
image, which is now popularly known as Hough
Transform. It involves transformation of points
in image space to parameter space of straight line
[4]. The Hough Transform transforms between
the Cartesian space and a parameter space in
which a straight line (or other boundary
formulation) can be defined [11].
III. PROPOSED METHOD
The disadvantages of Hough Transform can be
eliminated by proposing a Digital Straight Line
(DSL) version of Hough Transform, which is the
main contribution of this paper. This
implementation can be done in two ways. One is
to generate digital straight lines between two
black pixels and pool all black pixels into the bin
for that line. However, for n points, nC2 lines are
to be examined, that may be prohibitive for large
n. The other way is to look for all possible digital
straight lines generated by pairs of pixels on four
borders of a document image. This second
approach is elaborated in this paper. As the
reduced the computations needed in calculating
all possible straight lines in the image by
employing the redundancy in representing
parallel lines in an image.
A. Drawing Digital Straight Lines
Digital straight line has been rigorously
characterized by Rosenfeld. A digital space is
represented by lattice points that may be
considered as the centre of the pixels. Consider a
real line between any two lattice points p, q
belonging to a subset S of lattice points. If for
any real point (x, y) on this line, there is a lattice
point (i, j) in S such that max [| i-x |, | j-y |] < 1,
then S is a digital straight line segment.
Figure. 1 A Digital Straight Line
A document image is surrounded by four
borders, ‘AB’, ‘CD’, ‘AD’, and ‘BC’, as shown
in figure 1 and the pixels belonging to these
borders are called border pixels. The digital
straight lines considered here are those passing
through two border pixels. A typical straight line
obtained is illustrated in Figure 1 as PQ.
Two parallel digital straight lines in an
image follow the same pattern of pixels, as
shown in Figure 1.
IV. METHODOLOGY
In general, the images used for line detection are
usually gray scale images which are available
from common image sensors. A gray scale image
is made up of pixels of varying intensities. The
processing on these gray scale images are time
consuming and in order to make the processing
simple, time efficient and effective, the gray
scale images are initially converted to its
equivalent binary image. A binary image is one
in which the pixel values are either 0 or 1 (in
some cases 0 or 255).
A. Line Detection
The novelty of our approach of line
detection lies on the fact that the binarized image
is considered to be formed by several white and
black pixels at various lengths and at various
angles. By detecting the collinearity of white
patterns along horizontal paths, presence of a
line along the horizontal direction can be
detected. The collinearity of the pattern is
checked by the comparison of adjacent pixels for
same pattern in a row. This ultimately gives the
solution for detection of line within a row[5].
The values of each and every pixel in the
binarized image is extracted and stored in a
matrix format. In order to detect the presence of
a line in a row, two parameters are made use, one
to represent the starting coordinate and the
second to represent the end coordinate of a line.
Steps to Perform Line Detection
1) Initially the start and end coordinates
are set to a value -1, denoting that no
address values are assigned to them
2) Now, the value of the first pixel of the
first row from the matrix is examined
for the presence of a white pixel.
Two cases occur:
(a) Presence of white pixel: the
address corresponding to the
white pixel is stored in the start
and end coordinates.
(b) Absence of white pixel: the
start and end coordinates are
unaltered.
3) Then, the value of right adjacent pixel
from the matrix is examined.
Two cases occur:
(a) Presence of white pixel:
Here the values are checked for the
start and end coordinates which may or
may not be altered during the step 2.
If they are set: start coordinate is left as
such and the end coordinate is
incremented
If they are not set: start and end
coordinates are set to represent the
address of that particular pixel.
(b)Absence of white pixel: Here values
are again to check for the start and end
coordinates which may or may not be
altered during the step 2.
If they are set: start coordinate is left as
such and the end coordinate is set to the
address representing the previous pixel
location.
If they are not set: start and end
coordinates are left as such.
4) By repeating the above procedure the
continuity of the line is detected and
their corresponding start and end
address are also stored.
 5) Discontinuity occurs due to the
presence of any black pixel, in such a
case the start and end coordinates are
reset and the above procedure is
repeated.
The following Figure.2 represents procedure
for line detection with (a) showing the initial
arrangement of the coordinates,(b) showing
the presence of white pixel in the right
adjacent position,(c) showing the condition
of absence of white pixel and (d) case if any
discontinuity occurs in the collinearity.
B. Column Segmentation
The next processing will be column
segmentation, where previous methods exist[8].
A modification of the procedure used for line
detection can be extended to detect the presence
of lines in the vertical direction, which is
ultimately column segmentation, the next pre
processing step. The procedure will be similar to
that of the horizontal line detection.
Making use of the above method, may
lead to detect lines which are formed by even
two adjacent pixels. This disadvantage is
overcome by introducing a threshold value. The
use of a threshold value is of most importance
which leads to the fact of determining the
number of collinear points which make up a line.
The threshold is calculated by finding the
difference between the values of the end and
start coordinates. The threshold value may even
be a user defined value which makes the system
more advantageous and reliable.
C. Skew Angle Detection
When a document is imaged by flatbed
scanner of CCD camera, a few degrees of skew
is probable. To detect the skew angle, we convert
the image into two-tone [9] and consider the
count of black pixels along digital lines at
various angles. It can be safely assumed that the
skew angle of the image will not exceed 15(or -
15) degrees. Hence, digital lines are considered
in this range only.
The procedure to perform skew detection is
explained as follows.
The presence of a continuous straight line with
its length equal to that of the image size is to be
detected. Once this line is detected, and then by
making use of the simple mathematical equations
the angle in which the image is skew can be
calculated [6]. The skew detection can be better
explained with an example. Let us consider an
image of size 5 x 5. Initially the presence of a
continuous straight line is done with the
elements of the first row in the matrix, in this
case 5 elements. Now the same procedure is
repeated with elements of the matrix in first row,
except the last value. The last value will be one
which is the last value of the second row, i.e.,
first four elements of row 1 and the fifth element
of row 2. The next step will by using the first
three values of row 1 and the last two values of
row2. Thus the procedure is repeated until all
combinations are done.
Figure 3 Detecting Skew angle (Line with arrow
correspond to the straight line whose length
equals the size of the image)
D. Text Line Segmentation
The first step to any OCR system is to
automatically segment each text line from the
document.Various methods are proposed for text
line segmentation, the most common one being
the projection profile method, which works well
if the document is skew corrected. In this
section, we show that our digital line segment
based method can detect text line without skew
correction. In fact, both skew detection and line
identification can be done in one shot.
For documents with double, triple or more
number of text columns, as in some magazine
and newspaper pages, the approach is slightly
different. While traversing along a candidate
line, we keep a local count of the number of
connected white pixels. This is equivalent to
finding white digital lines rather than black ones.
As soon as this count exceeds a threshold value t,
that is to say, as soon as we come across a
connected white line of length greater than t, we
color the connected segment of white pixels. The
entire line is scanned for such connected white
components with subsequent coloring as
explained. The process is repeated for all
candidate lines.Some of the results obtained are
as illustrated in Figures 4 and 5.
Figure 5. Line and column segmentation in a
document image with picture

Figure 4. Line Segmentation of Skewed
English Script image with two columns
The result thusobtained for image with multiple
columns is shown in Figure 5, where row
segmentation and column segmentation have
been done together.
E. Character Segmentation
Character segmentation is an
operation that seeks to decompose an image
of a sequence of characters into sub images
of individual symbols. It is one of the
decision processes in a system for optical
character recognition (OCR). A Character is
a pattern that resembles one of the symbols
the system is designed to recognize[14]. But
to determine such a resemblance the pattern
must be segmented from the document
image. Segmentation is the initial step in a
three step procedure. Given a starting point
in a document image:
1) Find the next character image.
2) Extract distinguishing attributes of
the character image.
3) Find the member of a given symbol
set whose attributes best match
those of the input, and output its
identity.
This sequence is repeated until no additional
character images are found.

Figure 6.Character segmentation (Tamil Script)
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed for the
preprocessing of a document image, which
includes line segmentation, column
segmentation, skew detection, line and column
segmentation in skewed images which leads to
the isolation of a particular word and character.
Thus the recognized character can be used for
automatic essay scoring.
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