A method for combining complementary techniques for document image segmentation

Image segmentation is a major task of handwritten document image processing. Many of the proposed techniques for image segmentation are complementary in the sense that each of them using a different approach can solve different difficult problems such as overlapping, touching components, influence of author or font style etc. In this paper, a combination method of different segmentation techniques is presented. Our goal is to exploit the segmentation results of complementary techniques and specific features of the initial image so as to generate improved segmentation results. Experimental results on line segmentation methods for handwritten documents demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed combination method.