Recognition of handwritten character strings is a challenging problem, because we need to cope with variations of shapes and touching/breaking of characters at the same time. A natural approach to recognizing such complex objects is as follows: The object is decomposed into segments, and meaningful partial shapes (shapes which are recognized as some characters) are constructed by merging segments locally. Then, a globally consistent interpretation of the object is determined from the combination of partial shapes. This approach can be referred to as a model-based split-and-merge method. Based on this idea, we present an algorithm for recognition and segmentation of character strings. We give systematic performance statistics by experiments using handwritten numerals. This algorithm can be applied to character strings composed of any number of characters and any type of touching or breaking, whether the number of constituent characters is known or unknown.
