Strokes detection for skeletonisation of characters shapes

Abstract

Skeletonisation is a key process in character recognition in natural images. Under the assumption that a character is made of a stroke of uniform colour, with small variation in thickness, the process of recognising characters can be decomposed in the three steps. First the image is segmented, then each segment is transformed into a set of connected strokes (skeletonisation), which are then abstracted in a descriptor that can be used to recognise the character. The main issue with skeletonisation is the sensitivity with noise, and especially, the presence of holes in the masks. In this article, a new method for the extraction of strokes is presented, which address the problem of holes in the mask and does not use any parameters.