Multi-Oriented and Multi-Sized Touching Character Segmentation Using Dynamic Programming

In this paper, we present a scheme towards the segmentation of English multi-oriented touching strings into individual characters. When two or more characters touch, they generate a big cavity region at the background portion. Using Convex Hull information, we use these background information to find some initial points to segment a touching string into possible primitive segments (a primitive segment consists of a single character or a part of a character). Next these primitive segments are merged to get optimum segmentation and dynamic programming is applied using total likelihood of characters as the objective function. SVM classifier is used to find the likelihood of a character. To consider multi-oriented touching strings the features used in the SVM are invariant to character orientation. Circular ring and convex hull ring based approach has been used along with angular information of the contour pixels of the character to make the feature rotation invariant. From the experiment, we obtained encouraging results.