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http://dx.doi.org/10.3745/KIPSTB.2002.9B.4.481

An Efficient Character Image Enhancement and Region Segmentation Using Watershed Transformation  

Choi, Young-Kyoo (Dept.of Electric Electronics Computer Engineering, Dankook University)
Rhee, Sang-Burm (Dept.of Electric Electronics Computer Engineering, Dankook University)
Publication Information
The KIPS Transactions:PartB / v.9B, no.4, 2002 , pp. 481-490 More about this Journal
Abstract
Off-line handwritten character recognition is in difficulty of incomplete preprocessing because it has not dynamic information has various handwriting, extreme overlap of the consonant and vowel and many error image of stroke. Consequently off-line handwritten character recognition needs to study about preprocessing of various methods such as binarization and thinning. This paper considers running time of watershed algorithm and the quality of resulting image as preprocessing for off-line handwritten Korean character recognition. So it proposes application of effective watershed algorithm for segmentation of character region and background region in gray level character image and segmentation function for binarization by extracted watershed image. Besides it proposes thinning methods that effectively extracts skeleton through conditional test mask considering routing time and quality of skeleton, estimates efficiency of existing methods and this paper's methods as running time and quality. Average execution time on the previous method was 2.16 second and on this paper method was 1.72 second. We prove that this paper's method removed noise effectively with overlap stroke as compared with the previous method.
Keywords
Watershed Transformation; Preprocessing Process; Handwritten Character Recognition; Binarization; Thinning;
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