Classification of Printed and Handwritten Text: a Review

Separating handwritten and machine printed text from a document has many applications. Various types of documents like bank cheques and forms etc. are used in daily life which contains both handwritten as well as printed text. It is necessary to separate handwritten and machine printed text before processing it with optical character recognition system. Various strategies are used to discriminate between handwritten and printed text. Many methods are specific to a particular script and others can handle different type of scripts. The various steps to carry out this discrimination are performed in this sequence: scanning, pre-processing, feature extraction and classification. In this paper, an effort has been made to review the various techniques for discriminating handwritten and machine printed text.