%0 Conference Paper %B Intl. Conf. on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 11) %D 2011 %T Segmentation of Handwritten Textlines in Presence of Touching Components %A Kumar,Jayant %A Kang,Le %A David Doermann %A Abd-Almageed, Wael %X This paper presents an approach to textline extraction in handwritten document images which combines local and global techniques. We propose a graph-based technique to detect touching and proximity errors that are common with handwritten text lines. In a refinement step, we use Expectation-Maximization (EM) to iteratively split the error segments to obtain correct text-lines. We show improvement in accuracies using our correction method on datasets of Arabic document images. Results on a set of artificially generated proximity images show that the method is effective for handling touching errors in handwritten document images. %B Intl. Conf. on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 11) %P 109 - 113 %8 2011/// %G eng