A Procedure for Segmenting Touching Numbers in Cadastral Maps

We present a procedure to split (or segment) touching numerals. We are neither assuming a dominant orientation for the text direction nor long character strings. The basic idea is to compute the convex hull of the outer contour, to choose a baseline from one of the sides of the convex hull and to project the pixels of the touching characters (either perpendicularly or at a slant). Lu's function is then used to try to identify the splitting position. Other steps are then undertaken to find the splitting position of the more difficult cases. We present some results taken from touching numerals in cadastral maps.