Cursive Overlapped Character Segmentation: An Enhanced Approach
This addresses a specific challenge in handwriting recognition for cursive scripts, but appears incremental as it builds on existing segmentation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of segmenting highly slanted and horizontally overlapped cursive characters in handwriting recognition, presenting a new core-zone concept that achieves promising results and high speed without slant correction.
Segmentation of highly slanted and horizontally overlapped characters is a challenging research area that is still fresh. Several techniques are reported in the state of art, but produce low accuracy for the highly slanted characters segmentation and cause overall low handwriting recognition precision. Accordingly, this paper presents a simple yet effective approach for character segmentation of such difficult slanted cursive words without using any slant correction technique. Rather a new concept of core-zone is introduced for segmenting such difficult slanted handwritten words. However, due to the inherent nature of cursive words, few characters are over-segmented and therefore, a threshold is selected heuristically to overcome this problem. For fair comparison, difficult words are extracted from the IAM benchmark database. Experiments thus performed exhibit promising result and high speed.