Abstract
Character segmentation is a challenging problem in the field of optical character recognition. Presence of touched characters make this dilemma more crucial. The goal of this paper is to provide major concepts and progress in domain of off-line cursive touched character segmentation. Accordingly, two broad classes of technique are identified. These include methods that perform explicit or implicit character segmentation. The basic methods used by each class of technique are presented and the contributions of individual algorithms within each class are discussed. It is the first survey that focuses on touched character segmentation and provides segmentation rates, descriptions of the test data for the approaches discussed. Finally, the main trends in the field of touched character segmentation are examined, important contributions are presented and future directions are also suggested.