  Thinning of character images is a big challenge. Removal of strokes or
deformities in thinning is a difficult problem. In this paper, we have proposed
a medial axis based thinning strategy used for performing skeletonization of
printed and handwritten character images. In this method, we have used shape
characteristics of text to get skeleton of nearly same as the true character
shape. This approach helps to preserve the local features and true shape of the
character images. The proposed algorithm produces one pixel width thin
skeleton. As a by-product of our thinning approach, the skeleton also gets
segmented into strokes in vector form. Hence further stroke segmentation is not
required. Experiment is done on printed English and Bengali characters and we
obtain less spurious branches comparing with other thinning methods without any
post processing.
