A recognition method for touching Japanese handwritten characters

Describes a method for recognizing Japanese handwritten characters, including touching ones. The touching characters are segmented by cutting the connected components in a pre-segmentation process. The proposed segmentation method consists of the following steps: (1) identification of the touching components by checking the size of candidate character patterns; (2) estimation of the breakpoint and cutting of the components; and (3) generation of candidate character patterns by merging the components with adjacent patterns. The proposed method has the feature that the touching components can be identified even if they are comprised of relatively small patterns. The touching components are cut by using stroke width analysis and projection image analysis. This cut-and-merge procedure was able to segment 134 (88.2%) address lines correctly out of 152 Japanese address lines having touching portions, and could generate correct candidate character patterns.