Touching Character Separation in Chinese Handwriting Using Visibility-Based Foreground Analysis

In offline handwritten text recognition, the separation of touching characters remains a challenge due to the variability of touching structures. This paper proposes a new touching character separation method for Chinese handwriting based on skeleton analysis and contour analysis incorporating the visibility of separating points. Separating points are detected from strokes that are common in both upper and lower skeleton tracing, and the profile visibility of strokes and separating points is analyzed to adjust and verify separating points. Our experiments on two large handwriting databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.