Segmentation of handwritten words into characters

Abstract

In this paper, SFF (Segmentation Facilitate Feature) technique is proposed to find the junction path to segment touched components based on the seed pixel selected among candidate pixels. Handwritten Recognition system has number of applications like reading postal address, filling forms, reading bank cheques, offering several challenges. In practice, constitute of the word images get touched in handwritten data due to variability in stroke, shortage of space which make the individual character extraction from the word image more complicated. Segmentation of individual in a word image requires a technique that takes care of the variability of writing. This paper proposed the SFF (Segmentation Facilitate Feature) technique to find seed pixel among candidate pixels based on 3-neighbouring pixels. It is used to find junction pixels which form a junction path to segregate the touched component. The junction path is selected to avoid the issues arising due to artifacts or deletion of components features. For experimentation, 1840 legal amount words containing touching components are used. The above number includes 250 words from benchmark database (ICDAR) and 1590 words are gathered from 15 different writers. On implementing, SFF (Segmentation Facilitate Feature) technique on the above mentioned database, 89.9% accuracy is achieved and a higher accuracy level 96.2% is achieved when performed on 1000 words containing two touching consonants.