Dg. Yu et H. Yan, SEPARATION OF SINGLE-TOUCHING HANDWRITTEN NUMERAL STRINGS BASED ON STRUCTURAL FEATURES, Pattern recognition, 31(12), 1998, pp. 1835-1847
In this paper, we develop a new method to separate single-touching han
dwritten numeral strings with two numerals using structural features.
A binary image of a single-touching handwritten numeral string is prep
rocessed with an efficient algorithm for smoothing, linearization and
detection of structural points of image contours. The touching region
of a single-touching handwritten numeral string is determined based on
distribution of the structural points in the handwritten numeral stri
ng. A candidate touching point is preselected based on the geometrical
information of a special structural point in the touching region. In
some cases, the left or right lateral numeral of a single-touching han
dwritten numeral string can be recognized. The recognition information
can be utilized to correct the position of the candidate touching poi
nt. We have tested our method on image samples taken from the U.S. Nat
ional Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) database. We used 500
sample images for training and obtained a correct separation rate of
99.1%. For 3287 test samples not used for training the correct separat
ion rate was 97.2%. (C) 1998 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by
Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.