Localization of Touching Letters in Arabic Handwritten Documents

This work aims to localize touching letters, in arabic manuscripts, not only between successive text-lines but also between words in the same text-line. For vertically / up - down connected letters, we adapted the algorithm of Ouwayed et al. [8]. For horizontally / left - right connected letters, we proposed a new detection method based on curve convexity analysis associated to possible junction points under baseline. To evaluate both methods, we used a benchmarking dataset composed of 3000 separated and adjacent text-lines. We reported an accuracy around 94%.