Detection and segmentation of touching characters in mathematical expressions

A technique for the detection and the segmentation of touching characters in mathematical expressions is presented. In the detection stage, a connected component initially recognized into some category is judged as a candidate of touched characters if its feature values deviate from the standard feature values of the category. In the segmentation stage, two component characters of the candidate are decided by the comparison with touching character images synthesized from two single character images. Experimental results showed the effectiveness on the accuracy improvement of the recognition of mathematical expressions.