Analysis of textual images using the Hough transform

The analysis of images of printed pages of text is considered. Since printed text can be viewed as textured line, the use of the Hough transform for detecting straight lines is proposed as an analysis tool. Methods for handling several discretization problems that arise in mapping the rectangular image space to the (ρ, Θ) accumulator array are described. Several applications of analyzing the accumulator array are proposed. They include detecting the text skew angle, determining the signature of a text line so as to accept or reject a block as containing only text, using profile analysis to segment text into lines, and determining whether a textual block is rightside-up or otherwise.