12. A device for detecting the boundaries of characters in an electronic image, the electronic image including representations of characters, the device comprising: a processor; and a memory configured with processor-executable instructions which, when executed by the processor, implement a method, the method comprising: identifying a line of glyph-based character representations in the electronic image; isolating a plurality of glyph-based character representations; loading a set of character patterns into the memory; loading the plurality of glyph-based character representations into the cache; and recognizing the plurality of glyph-based character representations with the set of character patterns while one or more of the plurality of glyph-based character representations are in the cache.
12. A device for detecting the boundaries of characters in an electronic image, the electronic image including representations of characters, the device comprising: a processor; and a memory configured with processor-executable instructions which, when executed by the processor, implement a method, the method comprising: identifying a line of glyph-based character representations in the electronic image; isolating a plurality of glyph-based character representations; loading a set of character patterns into the memory; loading the plurality of glyph-based character representations into the cache; and recognizing the plurality of glyph-based character representations with the set of character patterns while one or more of the plurality of glyph-based character representations are in the cache. 16. The device of claim 12 , wherein the assigning of a penalty to the arcs includes assigning a first type penalty or a second type penalty to a respective arc based upon a position of the arc relative to a designated region in the histogram.