A Review of Various Line Segmentation Techniques Used in Handwritten Character Recognition

Abstract

AbstractSegmentation is a very critical stage in the character recognition process as the performance of any character recognition system depends heavily on the accuracy of segmentation. Although segmentation is a well-researched area, segmentation of handwritten text is still difficult owing to several factors like skewed and overlapping lines, the presence of touching, broken and degraded characters, and variations in writing styles. Therefore, researchers in this area are working continuously to develop new techniques for the efficient segmentation and recognition of characters. In the character recognition process, segmentation can be implemented at the line, word, and character level. Text line segmentation is the first step in the text/character recognition process. The line segmentation methods used in the character recognition of handwritten documents are presented in this paper. The various levels of segmentation which include line, word, and character segmentation are discussed with a focus on line segmentation.KeywordsSegmentationOCRPattern recognitionLine segmentationWord segmentationCharacter segmentationTouching lines segmentationOverlapping lines segmentation