Segmentation of handwritten Chinese characters from destination addresses of mail pieces

In this paper, we illustrate a method to segment handwritten Chinese characters from destination addresses of mail pieces. Fast Hough transform is utilized to detect the reference lines preprinted on the mail piece. In the segmentation, subassemblies of Chinese characters are merged based on the structural features of Chinese characters and the subassemblies' topological relations, viz. upper-lower, inside-outside and left-right relations. The width of subassemblies and the spacing between neighboring subassemblies in the whole image of the destination address are analyzed to guide the merging of the left-right subassemblies. Experimental results with real mail piece images show that the proposed approach has achieved a promising performance for segmenting handwritten Chinese characters.