Fast character segmentation of skewed text lines for optical character recognition

摘要

A character segmentation process for skewed documents divides the document bit map into vertical blocks and within each vertical block estimates initial top and bottom bounds of each character in a character row from horizontal projections of the vertical block, thereby avoiding the effects of skew. Operations in the document bit map to compute the exact top, bottom, left and right boundaries of the character are confined within the narrow strip between the initial top and bottom bounds of the character so as to greatly reduce the amount of data fetched from memory during such operations and thereby speed up the segmentation process.