Local segmentation of touching characters using contour based shape decomposition

We propose a contour based shape decomposition approach that provides local segmentation of touching characters. The shape contour is linearized into edge lets and edge lets are merged into boundary fragments. The connection cost between boundary fragments is obtained by considering local smoothness, connection length and a stroke-level property called the Same Stroke Rate. Samples of connections among boundary fragments are randomly generated and the one with the minimum global cost is selected to produce the final segmentation of the shape. To obtain a bipartite segmentation using this approach, we perform an iterative search for the parameters that finally yields two components on a shape. Experimental results on synthetic shape images and the LTP dataset show that this contour based shape decomposition technique is promising and it is effective for providing local segmentation of touching characters.