Image Segmentation of Historical Handwriting from Palm Leaf Manuscripts

Abstract: Palm leaf manuscripts were one of the earliest forms of written media and were used in Southeast Asia to store early written knowledge about subjects such as medicine, Buddhist doctrine and astrology. Therefore, historical handwrit-ten palm leaf manuscripts are important for people who like to learn about histori-cal documents, because we can learn more experience from them. This paper pre-sents an image segmentation of historical handwriting from palm leaf manuscripts. The process is composed of three steps: 1) background elimination to separate text and background by Otsu‘s algorithm 2) line segmentation and 3) character seg-mentation by histogram of image. The end result is the character’s image. The re-sults from this research may be applied to optical character recognition (OCR) in the future