Challenges in baseline detection of cursive script languages

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is an important task with the rapid growth of the digital computers, online information services, PDAs and for conversion of text documents into digital text. This task enhances preservation of records and makes the access to documents easier. So, Baseline detection is an important step in the OCR because it directly affects the rest of the steps and increase the performance and efficiency of character segmentation and feature extraction in OCR process. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of baseline detection methods for Urdu language. The aim of the paper is to introduce the challenges during baseline detection in cursive script languages for Nasta'liq and Naskh font. © 2013 The Science and Information Organization.