Segmentation of Bangla handwritten text into characters by recursive contour following

Segmentation of handwritten words into characters is one of the important components in handwritten text OCR. In this paper we put forward a method for the segmentation of handwritten Bangla (an Indo-Bangladeshi language) text into characters. Based on certain characteristics of Bangla writing methods, different zones across the height of the word are detected. These zones provide certain structural information about the constituent characters of the respective word. In Bangla handwritten texts often there is overlap between rectangular hulls of successive characters. As such the characters are seldom vertically separable. So, we propose a method of recursive contour following in one of the zones across the height of the word to find out the extents within which the main portion of the character lies. If the successive characters are not touching in the zone of contour following, the algorithm gives fairly good results.