Extraction of Characters and Modifiers from Handwritten Gujarati Words

The research activity related to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for almost all Indian languages is very less. Gujarati script is one of the scripts for which very less literature is available, as far as OCR activities are concerned. This paper describes one of the important phase of OCR, segmentation of handwritten words into its basic components namely basic characters, conjunct characters and modifiers, which are essential for recognition of a word. The paper describes methods for identification of zone boundaries for a word and usage of zone boundaries details for segmenting the word into its subcomponents. Connected component labeling is applied to detect subcomponents of a word, which can be further dissected if needed to obtain other subcomponents of word. It is the first attempt to dissect handwritten Gujarati words into its subcomponents.