Character Segmentation in Chinese Handwritten Text Based on Gap and Character Construction Estimation

Abstract

Character segmentation is a preprocessing step in many offline handwriting recognition systems. In this paper, Chinese characters are categorized into seven different structures. In each structure, the character size with the range of variations is estimated considering typical handwritten samples. The component removal and merge criteria are presented to remove punctuation symbols or to merge small components which are part of a character. Finally, the criteria for segmenting the adjacent characters concerning each other or overlapped are proposed.