STATISTICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SLANT ANGLES IN HANDWRITTEN NUMERAL STRINGS AND EFFECTS OF SLANT CORRECTION ON SEGMENTATION

Abstract

A novel and efficient method for correction of slant angles in handwritten numeral strings is proposed. For the first time, the statistical distribution of slant angles in handwritten numerals is investigated and the effects of slant correction on the segmentation of handwritten numeral strings are shown. In our proposed slant correction method, utilizing geometric features, a Component Slant Angle (CSA) is estimated for each connected component independently. A weighted average is then used to compute the String Slant Angle (SSA), which is applied uniformly to correct the slant of all the components in numeral strings. Our experimental results have revealed novel statistics for slant angles of handwritten numeral strings, and also showed that slant correction can significantly improve extraction of segmentation features and segmentation accuracy of touching numerals. Comparison between our slant correction algorithm and similar algorithms in the literature show that our algorithm is more efficient, and on average it has a faster running time.