Single-Line Text Detection in Multi-Line Text with Narrow Spacing for Line-Based Character Recognition

Abstract

Text detection is a crucial pre-processing step in optical character recognition (OCR) for the accurate recognition of text, including both fonts and handwritten characters, in documents. While current deep learning-based text detection tools can detect text regions with high accuracy, they often treat multiple lines of text as a single region. To perform line-based character recognition, it is necessary to divide the text into individual lines, which requires a line detection technique. This paper focuses on the development of a new approach to single-line detection in OCR that is based on the existing Character Region Awareness For Text detection (CRAFT) model and incorporates a deep neural network specialized in line segmentation. However, this new method may still detect multiple lines as a single text region when multi-line text with narrow spacing is present. To address this, we also introduce a post-processing algorithm to detect single text regions using the output of the single-line segmentation. Our proposed method successfully detects single lines, even in multi-line text with narrow line spacing, and hence improves the accuracy of OCR.