Touching Character Splitting of Chinese Handwriting Using Contour Analysis and DTW

The splitting of touching characters remains a challenge in over-segmentation, which is crucial to the performance of integrated segmentation-recognition of handwritten character strings. In this paper, we propose a new method based on contour analysis for touching character splitting in Chinese handwriting. To reliably locate splitting points on the contour of touching pattern, we pair upper and lower contour points using DTW (dynamic time warping) such that a corner point in upper/lower contour can be always paired with a proper contour point of opposite side for forming a splitting path. The splitting paths can then be verified by incorporating character recognition and contextual information. Our preliminary experiments on an image database of unconstrained Chinese handwriting demonstrate that the proposed method can give high recall rate of segmentation point detection.