Text Baseline Recognition Using a Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network

The detection of baselines of text is a necessary preprocessing step for many modern methods of automatic handwriting recognition. In this work, we present a two-stage system for the automatic detection of text baselines of handwritten text. In a first step, we perform pixel-wise segmentation on the document image to classify pixels as baselines, start points, end points and background. This segmentation is then used to extract the start points of lines. Starting from these points we extract the baseline using a recurrent convolutional neural network that directly outputs the baseline coordinates. This method allows the direct extraction of baseline coordinates as the output of a neural network without the use of any post-processing steps. We evaluate the model on the cBAD dataset from the ICDAR 2019 competition on baseline detection.