Segmentation of unconstrained handwritten numeral strings using the continuation property
Sungsoo Yoon, Gyeonghwan Kim, Yeongwoo Choi, Yillbyung Lee · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2000
The digit string recognition differs from that of isolated digits because it requires segmentation of a given string into individual digits. However, a proper segmentation requires a priori knowledge of the patterns that form meaningful units, which implies recognition capability. Therefore segmentation and recognition are not different things, rather one thing composed of two procedures with mutual dependencies. In this paper, we propose a new approach to segment the unconstrained handwritten numeral strings without the explicit guessing of break points. To segment the string of digits naturally, we adopt the concept of continuation and introduce the technique of subgraph matching to predefined prototypes. This approach makes an explicit segmentation unnecessary because it does not guess the possible break positions and also it possible to recognize a digit even if strokes not belonging to digit are attached to it. The correct segmentation rate of our method for 20 handwritten numerical strings belonging to NIST database is 97.5%.