Pre-processing steps applied to the system are noise removal, slant correction and smoothing chain code contours. Figure 2 shows the steps applied. Line separation Lines of text must be first separated before any recognition can proceed. A line separation algorithm that works on address blocks has been modified for the purpose. The algorithm uses the idea that the baseline of a handwritten line is well-defined.
People write on an imaginary line on which the core of each word of the line resides.
This imaginary baseline is approximated by the location of the local minima points from each component. A clustering technique is used to group the minima of all the components to identify the different handwritten lines. Sort all minima by x-value. Using average component height as a useful measure of probable distance between neighboring clusters, begin clustering of the minima from the left side of the image. A new cluster is created when the next minimum is farther than the average component height from all currently existing clusters.