Isolating individual handwritten characters

Describes a document reading system incorporating a pre-segmenter. The output from the pre-segmenter is passed into the character recognition stage of the document reader, which attempts classification of the objects between each pair of character boundaries within a joined group of characters. The combination of boundaries which achieves the highest overall confidence level for the whole group of joined characters is chosen to be the correct one. In addition, post-processing may be used to choose between the most likely interpretations of the words. This may simply take the form of a spelling checker correction system, or may be fed back into the earlier stages of the document reading system to request or suggest new segmentation positions or alternative character classifications.