Segmentation of touching characters in printed Devnagari and Bangla scripts using fuzzy multifactorial analysis

One of the important reasons for poor recognition rate in optical character recognition (OCR) system is the error in character segmentation. Existence of touching characters in the scanned documents is a major problem to design an effective character segmentation procedure. In this paper, a new technique is presented for identification and segmentation of touching characters. The technique is based on fuzzy multifactorial analysis. A predictive algorithm is developed for effectively selecting possible cut columns for segmenting the touching characters. The proposed method has been applied to printed documents in Devnagari and Bangla: the two most popular scripts of the Indian sub-continent. The results obtained from a test-set of considerable size show that a reasonable improvement in recognition rate can be achieved with a modest increase in computations.