Improving the use of contours for off-line Cursive Script Segmentation

In this paper we show a new method for efficiently extracting information from contour analysis and demonstrate their use to face the Cursive Script Segmentation challenge. Expressly, our method improves the use of contour to detect the so-called baselines and to use them for a \u201czone\u201d analysis of the text rows. Furthermore, we show how it is possible to use our method to solve critical situations due to slant and character overhanging. A final discussion about experimental results is also reported