Reading Auntie Pauline's Christmas letter [character recognition]

The author has developed software in the past that segments hand-printed characters using simple heuristics, normalises them, extracts features and recognises them using a quadratic discriminant function. He concluded that correct segmentation was the area that needed major research effort. If this could be done correctly then the recognition results would be reasonably impressive using existing software. He has developed software for producing outlines, and then strokes (or vectors) from scanned images. The original application was the capture of engineering drawings. The outlining is a crack-following approach. A sequence of mergelets forms a word. Finding the best sequence of mergelets is the formulation of the segmentation problem.