Abstract: To investigate the character extraction from complex background handwritten images,inertia quadrature,which is the second order statistic feature of gray level correlation matrix,is used for speckle reduction and foreground-background separation of document images,Hough transform is used for form frame line detection.The character extraction consists of line detection,speckle reduction,region growing,line removal,and broken stroke mending.The experimental results show that our proposed method is effective.