Segmentation of printed devnagari documents

Abstract

Document segmentation is one of the most important phases in machine recognition of any language. Correct segmentation of individual symbols decides the success of character recognition technique. It is used to decompose an image of a sequence of characters into sub images of individual symbols by segmenting lines and words. Devnagari is the most popular script in India. It is used for writing Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit and Nepali languages. Moreover, Hindi is the third most popular language in the world. Devnagari documents consist of vowels, consonants and various modifiers. Hence a proper segmentation Devnagari word is challenging. A simple approach based on bounded box to segment Devnagari documents is proposed in this paper. Various challenges in segmentation of Devnagari script are also discussed. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.