Kurdish Text Segmentation using Projection-Based Approaches

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%.