A modified thinning strategy to handle junction point distortion for Bangla characters

Thinning which is an important preprocessing step for character recognition is often subject to several kinds of distortion. Junction point distortion is a major imperfection in thinned images especially for handwritten Indian scripts due to the presence of large number of complicated junctions in them. Such distortion does allow the optical character recognition (OCR) systems to exploit the properties of these junctions for character recognition. We present a novel methodology to reduce distortion at junction regions adjoining the matra for BangIa script. Our method uses geometric properties of the junctions to solve the problem. We have tested our approach on our own data set consisting of a variety of isolated handwritten character images by different writers and have got promising results.