A segmentation method for touching italic characters

Segmentation is an essential part of a recognition system. It is difficult to handle touching characters, especially for italic fonts. We present a method to achieve the accurate segmentation of touching italic characters. It is free of slant correction, so extra noises will not be introduced. We use slant projection and contour analysis to find the segmentation points. Then the shortest path approach is adopted for accurately locating the cut path of each candidate segmentation point. Based on dynamic programming, we can find the best segmentation result from those cut paths. By this method, we can improve the recognition rate on italic fonts.