Title
Handwritten Text Segmentation via End-to-End Learning of Convolutional Neural Networks
Abstract
We present a method that separates handwritten and machine-printed components that are mixed and overlapped in documents. Many conventional methods addressed this problem by extracting connected components (CCs) and classifying the extracted CCs into two classes. They were based on the assumption that two types of components are not overlapping each other, while we are focusing on more challenging and realistic cases where the components are often overlapping each other. For this, we propose a new method that performs pixel-level classification with a convolutional neural network. Unlike conventional neural network methods, our method works in an end-to-end manner and does not require any preprocessing steps (e.g., foreground extraction, handcrafted feature extraction, and so on). For the training of our network, we develop a cross-entropy based loss function to alleviate theclass imbalanceproblem. Regarding the training dataset, although there are some datasets of mixed printed characters and handwritten scripts, most of them do not have overlapping cases and do not provide pixel-level annotations. Hence, we also propose a data synthesis method that generates realistic pixel-level training samples having many overlappings of printed and handwritten components. Experimental results on synthetic and real images have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method. Although the proposed network has been trained only with synthetic images, it also improves the OCR rate of real documents. Specifically, the OCR rate for machine-printed texts is increased from 0.8087 to 0.9442 by removing the overlapped handwritten scribbles by our method.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1007/s11042-020-09624-9
MULTIMEDIA TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Handwritten text segmentation,Text separation,Data synthesis,Class imbalance problem,Optical character recognition
Journal
79.0
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
43-44
1380-7501
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Junho Jo181.79
Hyung Il Koo223120.96
Jae Woong Soh3266.76
Nam Ik Cho4712106.98