The utilization of closing algorithm and heuristic information for broken character segmentation

ln Thai Printed Character Recognition systems, an important problem that dccreascs the accuracy is broken characters. These characters could cause the error in segmentation process. To solve this problem, a mcthod for broken character segmentation in Thai printed document is presented. It consists of two main steps: text line detection, for cxtracting text lines from an image, and character segmentation, for extracting broken characters from a text line. The character segmentation consists of four steps: Cap reduction using closing algorithm, Character segmentation using space, Large character splitting and Small character merging using heuristic information. The advantage of this approach is the ability to segment broken character even when it is split into a Iarge number of segments. The experimental result shown that our method achieves 91.09%.