Segmentation of interference marks using morphological approach

This paper deals with the extraction of words from printed documents that have interference and other strokes (enclosing curves, underlines etc.). A new algorithm which combines the two processes of thinning and detection of directional strokes to effectively segment not only straight lines but also smooth arbitrarily oriented curves. The algorithms preserve both connectivity and directional characteristics. The morphological operations based on multiple direction projection planes and skeleton images are adopted here to successfully prevent the "flooding water" effect of conventional morphological operations. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated on several experimental images.