Segmentation of Bangla unconstrained handwritten text

Abstract

To take care of variability involved in the writing style ofdifferent individuals in this paper we propose a robustscheme to segment unconstrained handwritten Banglatexts into lines, words and characters. For linesegmentation, at first, we divide the text into verticalstripes. Stripe width of a document is computed bystatistical analysis of the text height in the document.Next we determine horizontal histogram of these stripesand the relationship of the minimal values of thehistograms is used to segment text lines. Based onvertical projection profile lines are segmented intowords. Segmentation of characters from handwrittenword is very tricky as the characters are seldomvertically separable. We use a concept based on waterreservoir principle for the purpose. Here we, at first,identify isolated and connected (touching) characters ina word. Next touching characters of the word aresegmented based on the reservoir base area points andstructural feature of the component.