Cursive Overlapped Character Segmentation: An Enhanced Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel core-zone concept for segmenting highly slanted and overlapped cursive handwritten words without slant correction, improving accuracy and speed in challenging handwriting recognition tasks.

Contribution

It proposes a new core-zone based segmentation method that effectively handles slanted and overlapped cursive characters without prior slant correction.

Findings

High segmentation accuracy on IAM benchmark

Effective handling of highly slanted cursive words

Fast processing speed

Abstract

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.