Segmentation of Touching Component in Arabic Manuscripts

Touching components are connection zones occurring between text-lines or words of the same line and are one of the problems that make unconstrained handwritten text segmentation greatly hard. In this paper, we propose a recognition based method to separate these components once localized in Arabic manuscript images. It first identifies, for a given touching component, a similar model stored in a dictionary with its correct segmentation, using shape context descriptor and an interpolation function. Then, it segment the touching component based on the distance from the midpoints of the identified model´s parts. Tests are performed using a database of touching components and two metrics: Manhattan and Euclidean distances. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed segmentation method.