Handwritten and Printed Text Segmentation via Region-Aware Human-Writing Descriptor Engineering

Abstract

With the increasing demand for reusing paper documents in educational and office settings, accurate segmentation of handwritten and printed text has become a crucial step in document digitization. Although numerous deep learning models have been developed for this task, their high computational cost limits deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this challenge, we present a lightweight framework optimized for efficient performance on devices with severely limited computational capacity. Our approach begins with the Sentence-level Connected Component Segmentation algorithm, aimed at extracting coherent sentence-level segments from document images. We then design a novel Region-aware Handwriting Descriptor (RHD) to capture the intrinsic variability of human handwriting at the sentence level. A simple conventional classifier can then be seamlessly integrated with our designed descriptor, demonstrating strong classification performance for distinguishing handwritten and printed sentence-level text images, highlighting that the proposed descriptor is agnostic to the choice of classifier. Extensive experiments are performed on our self-constructed Multilingual High-Quality Annotated Dataset for Handwritten and Printed Text Segmentation (MAD-HPTS) and a public benchmark PHD-AS, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and computational efficiency. On MAD-HPTS, our method sacrifices only 1.4% accuracy compared to the leading deep neural network baseline, yet achieves more than 8 times speedup in inference, making it well-suited for lightweight deployment.