Segmentation of Touching Arabic Characters in Handwritten Documents by Overlapping Set Theory and Contour Tracing

Abstract

Segmentation of handwritten words into characters is one of the challenging problem in the field of OCR. In presence of touching characters, make this problem more difficult and challenging. There are many obstacles/challenges in segmentation of touching Arabic handwritten text. Although researches are busy in solving the problem of segmentation of these touching characters but still there exist unsolved problems of segmentation of touching offline Arabic handwritten characters. This is due to large variety of characters and their shapes. So in this research, a new method for segmentation of touching Arabic Handwritten character has been developed. The main idea of the proposed method is to segment the touching characters by identifying the touching point by overlapping set theory and ending points of the Arabic word by applying some standard morphology operation methods. After identifying all the points, segmentation method is applied to trace the boundaries of characters to separate these touching characters. Experiments were conducted on touching characters taken from different data sets. The results show the accuracy of the proposed method.