Oversegmentation Methods for Character Segmentation in Off-Line Cursive Handwritten Word Recognition - An Overview

Character segmentation (i.e., splitting the images of handwritten words into pieces corresponding to single letters) is one of the required steps in numerous off-line cursive handwritten word recognition solutions. It is also a very important step, because improperly extracted characters are usually impossible to recognize correctly with currently used methods. The most common method of character segmentation is initial oversegmentation – finding some set of potential splitting points in the graphical representation of the word and then attempting to eliminate the improper ones. This paper contains a list of popular approaches for generating potential splitting points and methods of verifying their correctness.