A new segmentation technique for multi font Farsi/Arabic texts

Segmentation is a very important stage of Farsi/Arabic character recognition systems. A new segmentation algorithm - for multi font Farsi/Arabic texts - based on the conditional labeling of the up contour and down contour is presented. A pre-processing technique is used to adjust the local base line for each subword. This algorithm uses an adaptive base line for each subword to improve the segmentation results. This segmentation algorithm, in addition to up and down contours, takes advantage of their curvatures also. The algorithm was tested on a data set of printed Farsi texts, containing 22236 characters, in 18 different fonts. 97% of characters were correctly segmented.