Machine Printed and Handwritten Text Discrimination in Korean Document Images

Nowadays, there are a lot of Korean documents, which often need to be identified in one of printed or handwritten text. Early methods for the identification use structural features, which can be simple and easy to apply to text of a specific font, but its performance depends on the font type and characteristics of the text. Recently, the bag-of-words model has been used for the identification, which can be invariant to changes in font size, distortions or modifications to the text. The method based on bag-of-words model includes three steps: word segmentation using connected component grouping, feature extraction, and finally classification using SVM(Support Vector Machine). In this paper, bag-of-words model based method is proposed using SURF(Speeded Up Robust Feature) for the identification of machine printed and handwritten text in Korean documents. The experiment shows that the proposed method outperforms methods based on structural features.