Segmentation of touching characters via tree-indexed demarcation using forward and backward searches

Abstract

In this article, a tree-indexed demarcation using forward and backward searches is proposed to segment the seriously touching characters, which is used as an important procedure for the character recognition in the real industrial scenarios. Unlike the segmentation directly depending on the histogram analysis, the reliable and unreliable valleys are first identified from a smoothed projection curve in our method, where a set of image pre-procedures are carefully carried out to catch this smoothed curve. With these operations, two segment binary trees are sequently constructed via the corresponding forwarding and backward searches of the valleys. Then, the delimiter candidates are sophisticatedly selected with a number of well-designed rules. The optimal segmented paths are finally obtained on the width variation measure of the characters, and the isolated characters are achieved. Experiments show that with our tree-indexed demarcation using forward and backward searches method, the touching character groups can be effectively segmented to better serve the industrial automatic recognition system.