Teachers consume considerable time and their energy in process of marking examination sheets. To reduce this burden on teachers, we have been developing an automatic marking system. To mark examination sheets automatically, handwritten character lines are extracted, and then the characters on those lines are recognized. In this paper, we discuss how character lines are extracted from Japanese handwritten examination sheets without ruled lines. Japanese characters can be written vertically and horizontally, so examination sheets written in Japanese are consisted of mixed vertical and horizontal (MVH) character lines. Conventional character line extraction methods cannot deal with MVH lines, because they have been developed to consider only horizontal character lines. This paper focuses on the simultaneous detection of MVH character lines. The result of experiments using appropriate examination sheet images shows that our method can detect MVH character lines effectively.
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