Segmentation of Bengali Handwritten Conjunct Characters Through Structural Disintegration

Substantial size of convoluted conjunct characters in Bengali language makes the recognition process burdensome. In this paper, we propose a structural disintegration based segmentation technique that fragments the conjunct characters into discernible shapes for better recognition accuracy. We use a set of structure based segmentation rules that bifurcates the characters into discernible shape components. The bifurcation is done by finding the touching region where two basic shapes coincide to form a conjunct character. The proposed method has been tested on a data set of Bengali handwritten conjunct characters efficiently. In future, we will continue our work to incorporate it as a prominent preprocessing step for Bengali optical character recognition system.

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