Handwritten text localization in skewed documents

A system for handwritten text localization in document images is proposed. Our system performs skew angle correction using the Wigner-Ville distribution and localizes the handwritten areas of the document based on several measures concerning regularity in shape (self-correlation, horizontal and vertical symmetry) and in dimensions (aspect ratio, distribution of heights and widths). The proposed technique was tested on a variety of documents and successfully handled more than 88% of the set while the misclassified areas in the rest of the documents did not exceed six in any document.