Segmentation of touching and fused Devanagari characters

Devanagari script is a two dimensional composition of symbols. It is highly cumbersome to treat each composite character as a separate atomic symbol because such combinations are very large in number. This paper presents a two pass algorithm for the segmentation and decomposition of Devanagari composite characters/symbols into their constituent symbols. The proposed algorithm extensively uses structural properties of the script. In the first pass, words are segmented into easily separable characters/composite characters. Statistical information about the height and width of each separated box is used to hypothesize whether a character box is composite. In the second pass, the hypothesized composite characters are further segmented. A recognition rate of 85 percent has been achieved on the segmented conjuncts. The algorithm is designed to segment a pair of touching characters.