Segmenting handwritten Chinese characters based on heuristic merging of stroke bounding boxes and dynamic programming

Abstract In handwritten Chinese characters, characters may be written to touch each other or to overlap with each other, therefore, the segmentation problem is not an easy one. In this paper, we present a novel method which uses strokes to build stroke bounding boxes first. Then, the knowledge-based merging operations are used to merge those stroke bounding boxes and, finally, a dynamic programming method is applied to find the best segmentation boundaries. A series of experiments show that our method is very effective for off-line handwritten Chinese character segmentation.