Skew angle detectionof a cursive handwritten Devanagari script character image.

This paper proposes an accurate and exhaustive approach to detect the skew angle of the images of words/ characters of cursive Devanagari script. This approach was applied to 235 writing samples and a total collection of around 6000 samples. It is efficient in terms of time and is a simpler process as compared to the existing ones. The method is an extension to the work of Pal and Chaudhuri [B. B. Chaudhuri and U. Pal, Skew angle detection of digitized Indian script documents, IEEE Trans. PAMI-19, 182-186 (1997)]. Heuristic approach has been applied to detect the skew angle. The inherent dominating features of the structure of the Devanagari script have been used to accurately calculate the skew of the Devanagari word.