Segmentation of Touching Conjunct Consonants in Telugu using Minimum Area Bounding Boxes
J. Bharathi, P. Chandrasekar Reddy · 2013
Abstract — This paper addresses the problem of segmenting touching characters which are written or printed in the bottom zone. In the segmentation of machine printed Telugu document image, conjunct consonants are more prone to touching due to shape of the characters. It is important to segment them properly to improve the accuracy of the Telugu OCR as otherwise the reconstruction and mapping to editable electronic document is incomplete and often needs lot of tedious manual intervention. It is based on the script level characteristic that the secondary form of consonants are written in smaller size and its bounding box is smaller compared to the primary character. The structural feature of sharp peaks in both left and right side profiles at the touching location of the combined character is used for determining the correct segmentation location. The algorithm is tested on a dataset created from large set of documents. The success rate of 96.39 % is achieved. Index Terms — Minimum area bounding box, segmentation, side profile peaks, touching conjunct consonants. I.