Template Based Segmentation of Touching Components in Handwritten Text Lines

In this paper, we present a template based approach to the segmentation of touching components in handwritten text lines. Local patches around touching components are identified and a dictionary is created consisting of template patches together with their correct segmentations. We use two shape context based methods to compute similarity between input patches and dictionary templates to find the best match. The template's known segmentation is then transformed to segment the input patch. Experiments are carried on a dataset of touching text lines.