Text line segmentation is a preprocessing step in OCR, which can significantly influence the accuracy of document analysis applications. This paper proposes a novel methodology for the text line segmentation of handwritten documents. First, the average width of the connected components is used to form a 1-D Gaussian kernel and a smoothing operation is then applied to the input binary image. The adaptive binarization of the smoothed image forms the final text lines. In this work, the segmentation method involves two stages: firstly, the large connected components are labelled as a unique text line using text line area mapping. Secondly, the final refinement of the segmentation is performed using the Euclidean distance between the text line and small connected components. The group of uniquely labelled text candidates achieves promising segmentation results. The proposed approach works well on Korean and English language handwritten documents captured using a camera.