SEPARATION OF SINGLE-TOUCHING AND DOUBLE-TOUCHING HANDWRITTEN NUMERALSTRINGS

To improve overall separation and classification performance for touch ing handwritten numeral strings, we have to deal with double-touching problems, which occur particularly for some combinations of digits. We propose a strategy to separate single- and double-touching numerical strings. The proposed technique includes: using two-cut links to deal with double-touching problems; using weighted geometric-property measu res to rank both one- and two-cut links; and using a rejection scheme to reject poor links at both ranking and recognition stages. Two-cut l ink pairs that join the high-curvature points in inner contour(s) to t hose in the external contour are considered when all one-cut links tha t join the upper and the lower external contours fail to separate them . All combinations of one- and two-cut links are ranked according to w eighted geometric-property measures, and the top links are chosen and tested by the recognition system. Experimental results on the National Institute of Standards and Technology database show that our system f or solving both single- and double-touching problems compares favorabl y with the other techniques tested.