A hybrid text line segmentation approach for the ancient handwritten unconstrained freestyle Modi script documents

In this paper a novel approach for the segmentation of text lines in handwritten, unconstrained, and freestyle Modi script document image is presented. The approach is based on the analysis of the gray level thresholding metric to estimate the text region location. True text line locations are estimated and segmented using the estimated text region location. The connected components of each estimated text region are scrutinized to group and calculate the text line region. The approach is recursively applied on the estimated line segments until the individual text lines are not separated. This algorithm handles various type of documents as multi-skewed, non-uniform Shirorekha, variable size characters or text lines, touching and overlapping line segments therefore it is robust. The algorithm is tested and compared using ancient handwritten Modi script documents and the benchmarking freely available online datasets, respectively.