A* Path Planning for Line Segmentation of Handwritten Documents

This project describes the use of a novel A* path-planning algorithm for performing line segmentation of handwritten documents. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the use of a smart combination of simple soft cost functions that allows an artificial agent to compute paths separating the upper and lower text fields. The use of soft cost functions enables the agent to compute near-optimal separating paths even if the upper and lower text parts are overlapping in particular places. We have performed experiments on the Saint Gall and Monk line segmentation (MLS) datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed method performs very well on the Saint Gall dataset, and also demonstrate that our algorithm is able to cope well with the much more complicated MLS dataset.

Captain's logs, 1777	Provincial archive, 1855	Early 15th century
MLS dataset

Saint Gall dataset