A New Character Segmentation Approach for Off-Line Cursive Handwritten Words

Character Segmentation is the most crucial step for any OCR (Optical Character Recognition) System. The selection of segmentation algorithm being used is the key factor in deciding the accuracy of OCR system. If there is a good segmentation of characters, the recognition accuracy will also be high. Segmentation of words into characters becomes very difficult due to the cursive and unconstrained nature of the handwritten script. This paper proposes a new vertical segmentation algorithm in which the segmentation points are located after thinning the word image to get the stroke width of a single pixel. The knowledge of shape and geometry of English characters is used in the segmentation process to detect ligatures. The proposed segmentation approach is tested on a local benchmark database and high segmentation accuracy is found to be achieved.