Detecting and eliminating false strokes in skeletons by geometric analysis
Si Wei Lu, Xu He, C. A. Wang · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1993
Skeletonization is a process by which a binary pattern of a character is transformed into another binary pattern consisting of its skeleton in order to reduce and extract information for further transmission or recognition. It is very important to preserve the shape of the original pre-thinned pattern in order to keep the necessary information for further processing. However, skeletonizing transformation generally results in distorted representation of the original pattern, and usually affects the possibility of correct recognition in the corresponding character. In this paper, a systematical algorithm is applied to detect and correct the distorted part of the skeleton by geometrical analysis. Hence, a more accurate stroke segmentation can be achieved to tell how the lines (strokes) cross (overlap) each other. Our method significantly reduces the rejection rate and substitution rate for character recognition.