A fuzzy approach to segment touching characters

Despite many years of research, correct and reliable segmentation of touching characters is still a hard task to solve. In the recent years, many methods and algorithms have been proposed; nevertheless the problem is still open. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on fuzzy logic that combines three different techniques to segment touching characters. These techniques have already been used in other studies but they have never been used all together. We propose a 3–input/1–output fuzzy inference system with fuzzy rules that are specifically optimized to segment touching Latin characters. The method is applicable to both printed and handwritten characters. We discuss the performances of our method by comparing it with state of the art. Results show that our method provide a better accuracy to segment characters even with noisy touching characters.