Abstract: The existing character segmentation methods have low segmentation accuracy when dealing with irregularly arranged Chinese text.A character segmentation method based on connected components is proposed to solve this problem.First,the text foreground is extracted and the text connected components are labeled.Second,the centroid and radius of each connected component are calculated to construct the bounding circle.Third,the false text connected components are removed according to the size of the bounding circles.Fourth,two bundling rules are customized considering the structural features of Chinese characters and then the character segmentation is realized for Chinese text.Experimental results show that,compared with the existing methods,the proposed method achieved much higher segmentation accuracy when dealing with irregularly arranged Chinese text and show good applicability to regularly arranged Chinese text.