## 4 Results and Discussion
### Implementation Results
While using the HP method, the gap between a Malayalam letter and a character such as 'Chandrakkala' placed above it, or as in compound characters where a letter is placed below another letter, results in the segmentation of such characters into separate lines called short lines. Since both these cases are not present in Figure 11, the possibility of 'Chandrakkala', a compound character segmented as a short line, is given in Figures 13-16. In Figure 13, 'Chandrakkala' is incorrectly segmented due to the small gap between the characters above which it is written, and this gap will vary depending on individual handwriting styles. The proposed techniques are able to exactly join 'Chandrakkala' to the correct line, which is shown in Figure 5.3 While writing a compound character with one letter below another letter, a space is created due to the writing style. Due to this gap, the letter written below is segmented as a short line, which is illustrated in Figure 5.4 The proposed techniques perfectly rejoin the letter, which is depicted in Figure 5.5 From the images in the LIPI database, 2607 short lines are detected, out of which 2577 short lines are joined perfectly to the appropriate lines. Figure 5.6 Result after segmenting the overlapping lines detected in the vertical stripes. Figure 5.7 Results after joining both lines to the appropriate text lines in the vertical stripe. To obtain the complete line, the lines extracted in the three vertical stripes are joined together with the corresponding lines. The result of complete text line extraction is shown in Figure 5.8  
When a text line is extracted from a vertical stripe, the upper and lower positions of the line in the vertical stripe are stored in an array. When short lines are detected and joined to the correct lines, the position of the newly formed line is stored and that of the short line will be deleted. When a short line is joined to the correct line, the total number of lines extracted from the vertical stripe is reduced accordingly. Similarly, as for the overlapping lines, the positions of newly formed lines after segmenting the overlapping lines will be updated and the total number of lines in the vertical stripe will be increased accordingly. After completing the line extraction separately from each vertical stripe, it has to be joined to the corresponding part of this line in the other two vertical stripes. One of the challenges encountered is that the lines extracted from the vertical stripe may not have the same height. To overcome this, a template of black pixels with the same size as the binarized document image is created. Then, a text line from vertical stripe 1 is placed in the position from which it is extracted. Similarly, the corresponding part of this text line from vertical stripe 2 and vertical stripe 3 is placed and a complete line is formed. As can be observed, the extracted text line appears identical to the text line in the inverted binarized image. Then, the text line formed is stripped off from the template and the output is shown in Figure 5.9  
Figure 7.0 Result of applying proposed method to join short line back to the original line. Figure 7.1 Result of applying proposed method to join short line containing ‘Chandrakkala’ back to the original line. Figure 7.2 Short line containing character ‘Chandrakkala’ above the alphabet. The process of joining the text lines extracted from the three vertical stripes is performed successfully, exactly matching the text line in the binarized image. An error occurs only if the text lines are not extracted correctly from any of the three vertical stripes.