Kurdish Text Segmentation using Projection-Based Approaches

Authors

  • Tofiq Ahmed Tofiq Department of Computer Science, College of Science, University of Sulaimani, Sulaimani, Iraq
  • Jamal Ali Hussein Department of Computer Science, College of Science, University of Sulaimani, Sulaimani, Iraq

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21928/uhdjst.v5n1y2021.pp56-65

Keywords:

Optical character recognition, Character segmentation, Kurdish text segmentation, Projection-based approach, Cursive writing optical character recognition

Abstract

An optical character recognition (OCR) system may be the solution to data entry problems for saving the printed document as a soft copy of them. Therefore, OCR systems are being developed for all languages, and Kurdish is no exception. Kurdish is one of the languages that present special challenges to OCR. The main challenge of Kurdish is that it is mostly cursive. Therefore, a segmentation process must be able to specify the beginning and end of the characters. This step is important for character recognition. This paper presents an algorithm for Kurdish character segmentation. The proposed algorithm uses the projection-based approach concepts to separate lines, words, and characters. The algorithm works through the vertical projection of a word and then identifies the splitting areas of the word characters. Then, a post-processing stage is used to handle the over-segmentation problems that occur in the initial segmentation stage. The proposed method is tested using a data set consisting of images of texts that vary in font size, type, and style of more than 63,000 characters. The experiments show that the proposed algorithm can segment Kurdish words with an average accuracy of 98.6%.

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Published

2021-05-16

How to Cite

Tofiq, T. A., & Hussein, J. A. (2021). Kurdish Text Segmentation using Projection-Based Approaches. UHD Journal of Science and Technology, 5(1), 56–65. https://doi.org/10.21928/uhdjst.v5n1y2021.pp56-65

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Section

Articles