Estimation de l'inclinaison d'un document arabe manuscrit numérisé par analyse temps-fréquence des histogrammes de projection
Nazih Ouwayed, Abdel Belaı̈d, François Auger · DSpace (Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique) · 2009
Ancient Arabic textual archives contain a heavy volume of handwritten documents that need to be scanned and indexed. Some of these documents are skewed, making their recognition and indexing difficult because straight lines are more suitable for the word extraction by recognition systems. We are looking for a method that can robustly estimate this orientation, whatever the size of the document. The scientific literature already proposes some solutions for image document skew angle estimation. The projection techniques seem the most appropriate ones but need to be adapted to Arabic documents. In fact, in Arabic script, the words are made of PAWs (Parts of Arabic Words) which are almost vertical or oblique and which may distort the calculation of local orientation. This prevents to apply local techniques like nearest neighbors, because of the alignment irregularity, or global techniques such as the Hough Transform because of the difficulty of locating voting points. Although these techniques fit well to printed documents, they remain inadequate to handwritten documents, in which the interline distance is random and the skew angle can be large. Kavallieratou et al. employed Cohen's class distributions on Latin documents. This Cohen's class contains all the quadratic time-frequency distributions that are covariant under time- and frequency-shifts. The members of this class are identified by a particular kernel φdD(τ,ξ), which determines their theoretical properties and their practical readability. In Kavallieratou's paper, the relationship between the distributions properties and the experimental results are not highlighted. We propose in this article to look for the most relevant properties related to the skew angle estimation problem and to find, thanks to them, the best distribution to use...