A new method for the segmentation of mixed handprinted Chinese/English characters

Describes a new method to segment mixed handprinted Chinese/English characters. First, connected component analysis is performed on each text line. A pre-merging step combines those vertical-neighboring bounding rectangles into a new one, but leaves alone the horizontal-neighboring ones which may belong to different characters. Then the feature-complexity analysis of each bounding rectangle is used to classify it into an alphanumeric character, an isolated Chinese radical or a complete Chinese character. Finally, based on the recognition result of an isolated Chinese radical and heuristic formation rules, an isolated Chinese radical may be further combined with adjacent bounded rectangle(s) to make one single character rectangle for a separate character. Implementation and experimental results of the proposed method are described