Segmentation of touching symbols for OCR of printed mathematical expressions: an approach based on multifactorial analysis

This paper deals with segmentation and recognition of touching characters appearing in scanned mathematical expressions. The technique is based on multifactorial analysis that integrates several factors determining cut-positions in a touching character image. A predictive algorithm is developed for efficient selection of possible cut-positions for segmenting touching characters. Experiment has been carried out using a test-set of reasonable size and results show that a considerable improvement in recognition accuracy can be achieved with a modest increase in computations.