Image processing / super light OCR

Question

I have 55 000 image files (in both JPG and TIFF format) which are pictures from a book.

The structure of each page is this:

some text

Answer 1

Probably the easiest way to detect your lines is using the Hough transform in OpenCV (which has wrappers for many languages).

The OpenCV Hough tranform will detect all lines in the image and return their angles and start/stop coordinates. You should only keep the ones whose angles are close to horizontal and of adequate length.

O'Reilly's Learning OpenCV explains in detail the function's input and output (p.156).