Text Lines and Words Variational Extraction from Ancient Printed Documents

In document image analysis the task of segmenting images of ancient printed documents in distinct elements is known to be a very complex problem. In general, these documents are of low quality and can present skew and degradations because of old printing or ink stains. To face these problems we will show and discuss the validity of the Mumford and Shah variational method, based on the ? convergence theory, along with its numerical handling. In particular, we segment and extract the interest regions, constituted by textual and non-textual blocks, from page images of ancient books, combining the variational approach with morphological operations. Study case is the first edition of 'Scienza Nuova' (1725) of Giambattista Vico.