A Study on the Preprocessing Method Using Construction of Watershed for Character Image segmentation

Off-line handwritten character recognition is in difficulty of incomplete preprocessing because it has not dynamic and timing information besides has various handwriting, extreme overlap of the consonant and vowel and many error image of stroke. Consequently off-line handwritten character recognition needs to study about preprocessing of various methods such as binarization and thinning. This paper considers running time of watershed algorithm and the quality of resulting image as preprocessing For off-line handwritten Korean character recognition. So it proposes application of effective watershed algorithm for segmentation of character region and background region in gray level character image and segmentation function for binarization image and segmentation function for binarization by extracted watershed image. Besides it proposes thinning methods which effectively extracts skeleton through conditional test mask considering running time and quality. of skeleton, estimates efficiency of existing methods and this paper's methods as running time and quality. Watershed image conversion uses prewitt operator for gradient image conversion, extracts local minima considering 8-neighborhood pixel. And methods by using difference of mean value is used in region merging step, Converted watershed image by means of this methods separates effectively character region and background region applying to segmentation function. Average execution time on the previous method was 2.16 second and on this paper method was 1.72 second. We prove that this paper's method removed noise effectively with overlap stroke as compared with the previous method.