Chinese handwritten character segmentation in form documents

Abstract

This paper presents a projection based method for segmenting handwritten Chinese characters in form documents with known structures. In the preprocessing phase, a noise removal method is proposed that preserves stroke connections and character edge points. In the character segmentation phase, the projection profile analysis method is used to segment a text line image into projection blocks. In addition, projection blocks are classified into one of four types: mark, half-word, single-word, and two-word. Large blocks are then split and small blocks are merged. In addition, an OCR system is adopted to eliminate errors resulting from the inappropriate merging of Chinese numerical characters with other characters. As for 1319 Chinese characters are tested during our experiments, the correct segmentation rates of 92.34% and 91.76% are obtained with and without the OCR module.