An Approach of Strike-through Text Identification from Handwritten Documents

A handwritten document may contain strike-through texts. If such texts are fed into an OCR system, the output will be garbage. In this paper, we propose a scheme to detect such strike-through texts/words. Using a graph based model, we represent a textual connected component as a graph. The start/end and intersection points of the ink-strokes of a component are marked as graph nodes. There exists an edge between two nodes if they are connected by object (ink) pixels. By eliminating parallel edges and self loops we obtain a simple, undirected, edge-weighted graph of the text-component. The edge-weight is found by adding horizontal/vertical moves weighted by 1 and diagonal moves weighted by root 2. In this graph, we find the shortest path vvhich is nearly as long as the width of the text component and maintains a reasonable degree of straightness. This path, if exist, is identified as the strike-through line. Here we deal with handwritten documents in English, Bengali and Devanagari script. Our approach delivers fairly good results.