Skew Detection for Thai Printed Document Images

The paper proposes the scheme of skew detection for Thai printed document images by using linear regression algorithm. It intends to use with the Thai character recognition systems to reduce the skew detection time. This scheme begins by finding the center of gravity of a document image. This point is used as the starting point for gathering data in the scheme. The data is obtained by scanning incrementally one pixel in vertically with the width of 20-pixels. After the scanning process, if data Is different from it's neighbor more than ${\pm}$ 15 pixels, it will be considered as noise or data in other lines and will be deleted. The last step is the operation by using linear regression algorithm on these selected data and the skew angle will be obtained. The proposed method has been tested with 45 document images with different fonts, sizes and skew angles. The experiment results show that the proposed method can detect the skew angle with the error of less then one degree. The average processing time is about 19 times faster than that of the Hough Transform method.