Binary segmentation algorithm for English cursive handwriting recognition

Segmentation in off-line cursive handwriting recognition is a process for extracting individual characters from handwritten words. It is one of the most difficult processes in handwriting recognition because characters are very often connected, slanted and overlapped. Handwritten characters differ in size and shape as well. Hybrid segmentation techniques, especially over-segmentation and validation, are a mainstream to solve the segmentation problem in cursive off-line handwriting recognition. However, the core weakness of the segmentation techniques in the literature is that they impose high risks of chain failure during an ordered validation process. This paper presents a novel Binary Segmentation Algorithm (BSA) that reduces the risks of the chain failure problems during validation and improves the segmentation accuracy. The binary segmentation algorithm is a hybrid segmentation technique and it consists of over-segmentation and validation modules. The main difference between BSA and other techniques in the literature is that BSA adopts an un-ordered segmentation strategy. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on CEDAR benchmark database and the results of the experiments are very promising. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.