Statistical mixture model for documents skew angle estimation

We present a statistical approach to skew detection, where the distribution of textual features of document images is modeled as a mixture of straight lines in Gaussian noise. The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is used to estimate the parameters of the statistical model and the estimated skew angle is extracted from the estimated parameters. Experiments demonstrate that our method is favorably comparable to other existing methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

► In this paper we present a novel approach for detecting the skew of document images. ► The proposed method is based on a special statistical mixture model. ► The model can be viewed as a GMM where the mean of each component is a straight line. ► The parameters of the statistical model are estimated using the EM algorithm.