An Effective Multi-stage Segmentation Method for Handwritten Chinese Characters
一种有效的手写汉字多步分割方法

Handwritten Chinese charaters segmentation is crucial to their recognition in OCR system.In practice,handwritten Chinese characters may be written touching or overlapping each other,and between-character gap or inter-character gap has large variations.For the problem posed by above situations,a multi-stage method of handwritten Chinese characters segmentation is proposed.Firstly,Viterbi algorithm is employed to obtain the no touching or overlapping characers from the separated blocks of the characters string.Then,for the touching charcters in the wide blocks,the segmention is performed by searching non-linear segmentation paths which pass through the candidate segmentation points.Finally,A* algorithm is applied to determine the optimal segmention paths.As a result,over-segmentation components are merged into whole characters.Experimental results show the proposed method is feasible and effective for off-line handwritten Chinese characters segmentation.