Character Segmentation of Hindi Unconstrained Handwritten Words

摘要

The proper character level segmentation of printed or handwritten text is an important preprocessing step for optical character recognition (OCR). It is noticed that the languages having cursive nature in writing make the segmentation problem much more complicated. Hindi is one of the well known language in India having this cursive nature in writing style. The main challenge in handwritten character segmentation is to handle the inherent variability in the writing style of different individuals. In this paper, we present an efficient character segmentation method for handwritten Hindi words. Segmentation is performed on the basis of some structural patterns observed in the writing style of this language. The proposed method can cope with high variations in writing style and skewed header lines as input. The method has been tested on our own database for both printed and handwritten words. The average success rate is 96.93%. The method yields fairly good results for this database comparing with other existing methods. We foresee that the proposed character segmenattion technique can be used as a part of an OCR system for cursive handwritten Hindi language.