Shirorekha extraction in Character Segmentation for printed devanagri text in Document Image Processing

Finding Structural Layout, Text Line Segmentation, Word Level Segmentation and Character Level Segmentation is major step in offline OCR systems for Devanagari Script in Document Image Processing. This paper proposes a Word and Character Segmentation method for machine printed Devanagari text. A complete word and character segmentation system for Devanagari printed text is presented here. Sometimes, interline space and fused characters make line segmentation and character segmentation a difficult task respectively. We have tested our method on documents in Marathi scripts. A novel technique of character segmentation for printed Devanagari text is presented here. After removing the Shirorekha (header line) of Devanagari text, the bounding boxes are used to surround the segmented characters. Results obtained from this method are encouraging because of morphological operations. In this method we are proposing some basic morphological operations on the scanned document images and got much better results.