  Segmentation of handwritten document images into text lines and words is one
of the most significant and challenging tasks in the development of a complete
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system. This paper addresses the automatic
segmentation of text words directly from unconstrained Bangla handwritten
document images. The popular Distance transform (DT) algorithm is applied for
locating the outer boundary of the word images. This technique is free from
generating the over-segmented words. A simple post-processing procedure is
applied to isolate the under-segmented word images, if any. The proposed
technique is tested on 50 random images taken from CMATERdb1.1.1 database.
Satisfactory result is achieved with a segmentation accuracy of 91.88% which
confirms the robustness of the proposed methodology.
