Recognition Driven Page Orientation Detection

In document image recognition, orientation detection of the scanned page is necessary for the following procedures to work correctly as they assume that the text is well oriented. Several methods have been proposed, but most of them rely on heuristics of the script such as the graphical asymmetry between ascenders and descenders for Roman script. The literature shows that as soon as this assumption is not fulfilled, e.g. plain capital text, noisy or degraded characters, etc. they fail. For a large-scale digitalization process, a low error and rejection rate are expected in order to reduce the amount of human intervention. We propose a Recognition Driven Page Orientation Detection (RD-POD) which does not depend on external criteria or assumption on the shape of the script. It uses the OCR engine for estimating the right orientation with a few lines of the document image. The RD-POD is highly robust and accurate, and is able to detect multiple orientations. Experimental evaluation shows that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art on UW-1 dataset with an accuracy of 99.7%. Further tests on other three large and public datasets (MARG, ICDAR07, Google 1000 books) show accuracies of above 99% on each of them.