中文摘要：

小字号英文印刷字符的分割依然是OCR领域中一个富于竞争力的问题．其主要困难在于字符能量小、字符之间存在粘连．本文重点分析衬线粘连的几种类型，并提出衬线去除算法．然后，在此基础上提出一种小字号印刷字符的分割算法．实验结果表明，该方法可以有效分割小字号英文印刷字符．此外，本文方法对大字号字符的分割也是有效的．

英文摘要：

To segment machine-printed English characters of small font is a challenging problems. It is difficult to segment small font characters because of their small energies and the overlap by letters. In this paper, many kinds of overlaps caused by the serifs of letters are analyzed, and an algorithm to remove the serifs is proposed. Consequently, a method to segment machine-printed English characters of small fonts is designed. Experiments give encouraging segmentation results for not only small font characters but also large font characters.