Segmentation of mixed Chinese/English document including scattered italic characters

It is difficult to segment mixed Chinese/English documents when there are many italic characters scattered in documents. Most contributions attach more attention to English documents. However, mixed document is different from English document and some special features should be considered. This paper gives a new way to solve the problem. At first, an appropriate character area is chosen to detect italic. Next, a two-step strategy is adopted. Italic determination is done first and then if the character pattern is identified as italic, the estimation of slant angle will be done. Finally the italic character pattern is corrected by shear transform. A method of adopting two-step weighted projection profile histogram for italic determination is introduced. And a fast algorithm to estimate slant angle is also introduced. Three large sample collections, including character and character-pair and document respectively, are provided to evaluate our method and encouraging results are achieved.