Is there an efficient algorithm for segmentation of handwritten text?

Question

I want to automatically divide an image of ancient handwritten text by lines (and by words in future).

The first obvious part is preprocessing the image...

Answer 1

After fiddling around this for a while I found that I simply need to count the number of crossings for each line, that is, a switch from white to black would count as one, and a switch from black to white would increment by one again. By highlighting each line with a count > 66 I got close to 100% accuracy, except for the bottom most line.

Of course, would not be robust to slightly rotated scanned documents. And there is this disadvantage of needing to determine the correct threshold.