In Shapiro et al.[49],
the global orientation (skew angle) of a handwritten page is first searched by applying a Hough transform on the entire image.
Once this skew angle is obtained, projections are achieved along this angle.
The number of maxima of the profile give the number of lines.
Low maxima are discarded on their value, which is compared to the highest maxima.
Lines are delimited by strips, searching for the minima of projection profiles around each maxima.
This technique has been testedon a set of 200 pages within a word segmentation task.