Text Separation From Document Images

Abstract

Text separation in document image analysis is an important preprocessing step before executing an optical character recognition (OCR) task. It is necessary to improve the accuracy of an OCR system. Traditionally, for separating text from a document, different feature extraction processes have been used that require handcrafting of the features. However, deep learning-based methods are excellent feature extractors that learn features from the training data automatically. Deep learning gives state-of-the-art results on various computer vision, image classification, segmentation, image captioning, object detection, and recognition tasks. This chapter compares various traditional as well as deep-learning techniques and uses a semantic segmentation method for separating text from Devanagari document images using U-Net and ResU-Net models. These models are further fine-tuned for transfer learning to get more precise results. The final results show that deep learning methods give more accurate results compared with conventional methods of image processing for Devanagari text extraction.