Color Independent Word Segmentation From Transcribed Bangla Passages

Abstract

An optical character recognition(OCR) system can scan paper and extract text, making people's jobs easier. While numerous OCR systems are accessible in the software sector, finding a dependable equivalent solution for Bangla is tough. When it comes to handwritten texts, the case is even more rare. The first fundamental step to any OCR is to segment words from text images. If this stage fails, the total OCR's performance will be poor no matter how promising the later stages perform. This research aims to segment words in a handwritten Bangla text image. This research can be implemented on any smartphone-captured image, irrespective of the color and type of paper and ink. Furthermore, as smartphone-captured images can create shadow interferences, the custom dataset built for this research is created in such a way that every possible obstacle that can be faced is included. For 7374 words, a total of 7278 bounding boxes are generated, which have recall of 90.60 %, precision of 91.80 %, and F1-score of 91.20 %. The system can be further improved with nested operations on bounding boxes containing several words or by adjusting the adaptive thresholding and dilation filter sizes to a more precise level.