A knowledge-based segmentation system for handwritten dates on bank cheques

Segmenting handwritten date fields on bank cheque images into three subimages corresponding to the day, month and year is the first and critical step of our date recognition system. The paper describes a knowledge-based segmentation system, which introduces different kinds of knowledge at different segmentation stages to improve the performance. The knowledge includes information on the writing style, syntactic and semantic constraints, etc. Results have shown that the system is very effective compared with a previous structural feature based method.