Character segmentation from ancient palm leaf manuscripts in Thailand

This paper presents a character segmentation system from ancient palm leaf manuscripts written in ancient Thai language. This aims to develop an automated system for the digitization and processing of ancient manuscripts. In this paper, the preprocessing stage of noise reduction is carried out. An optimal binarization is selected in order to reduce the unrelated noise and background information on the document. The proposed approach can improve the readability of the documents and enable selection of the optimal binarization technique. Text line segmentation is then applied to partial projection profiles, and the characters are separated by using the contour tracing algorithm and a trace of background skeleton. The experiment results have shown that this proposed system can be used to support subsequent steps such as automatic recognition of characters from Thai ancient palm leaf.