Connected Component Level Discrimination of Handwritten and Machine-Printed Text Using Eigenfaces

We employ Eigenfaces to discriminate between handwritten and machine-printed text at the connected component (CC) level. Normalized images of machine print CCs are treated as points in a high-dimensional space. PCA yields a reduced-dimensional character space. Representative machine print CCs are projected into character space and a local distance threshold for each representative is automatically determined. CCs are classified as machine print if they are within the local distance threshold of their closest machine print representative. Otherwise, they are classified as handwriting. Recursive character segmentation using min graph cut is used to address the problem of touching characters. Validation over a large NIST handwriting and machine print database demonstrates precision of 93.98% and 89.1% for machine print and handwriting respectively.