Abstract
Degradation on characters and digits may lead to breaks in strokes and even to the splitting of the characters or digits into two or more separate components. These degradations may cause reduction in performance of automatic recognizers and several other procedures applied to document images. It is presented herein a method for reconstructing degraded strings of digits. The method emulates physical forces such as inertial and centripetal force to analyze digits strokes and to perform the reconstruction. The type of path to be followed (straight or curve) is defined automatically such that a specific force is activated. It is shown that the method succeeds in reconstructing breaks present in digits and in performing no reconstructions where none is needed, that is, not linking individual digits. Experimental studies on Brazilian bank checks show the efficacy of the method, which has proven to improve the recognition rates of degraded digit strings by 10 percentage points which is a significant value in financial applications as automatic bank check processing.