An Improved method for segmentation of touching symbols in printed mathematical expressions

The segmentation of touching symbols is one of the key factors which affect the performance of printed mathematical expression recognition system. An Improved method for segmentation of touching symbols in printed mathematical expressions is presented. This method is suitable for different types of touching symbols. Firstly, the outer contour of the symbol image is extracted based on contour tracing algorithm. Next, the concave corner points are detected by corner detection algorithm. These concave corner points are considered as the candidate segmentation points. Finally segmentation paths are constructed to achieve the segmentation of the touching symbol.