In this paper, we develop a new method to separate touching handwritten multi-numeral strings using morphological structural features. The touching numeral string is preprocessed with an efficient algorithm for smoothing, linearization and detection of structural points of image contours. Based on the analysis of morphological structure in a string, the region of the left two numerals is determined. In this way, the task of separating a multi-numeral string is reduced into to process several two-numeral strings. This processing is continued until the touching region found consists of only one numeral. We have tested our method on image samples taken from the US National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) database and the experimental results demonstrate the method is efficient. (C) 2001 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. [References: 8]
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