Using tabu search for segmentation of cursive handwriting

The recognition of cursive handwriting remains a challenging an open problem, especially for the case of off-line recognition from a scanned image. The authors research on the recognition of handprinted characters has achieved some success as reported in Elliman et al. (1991). In attempting to recognise increasingly careless handprint it becomes necessary to segment touching characters, and to join separated ones. The distinction between cursive writing and handprint is a fuzzy one with no clear dividing line, and it became evident that our methods should generalise across this spectrum if they were to be successful for general document reading. Familiarity with the literature of the field led the authors to believe that an extension of their approach to handprint could be useful for the recognition of cursive script, especially in the more challenging case of off-line recognition. Every year at Christmas time one of the authors is faced with a strong challenge to his own ability to recognise handwriting, in the form of a letter from his Auntie Pauline. An extract from the 1998 letter was scanned and is taken as an example for testing the approach.