Complete System for Text Line Extraction Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Watershed Transform

We present a novel Convolutional Neural Network based method for the extraction of text lines, which consists of an initial Layout Analysis followed by the estimation of the Main Body Area (i.e., the text area between the baseline and the corpus line) for each text line. Finally, a region-based method using watershed transform is performed on the map of the Main Body Area for extracting the resulting lines. We have evaluated the new system on the IAM-HisDB, a publicly available dataset containing historical documents, outperforming existing learning-based text line extraction methods, which consider the problem as pixel labelling problem into text and non-text regions.