Help with segmentation of characters

I have this image.

I have performed line segmentation and now I am trying to use regionprops to perform character segmentation. The problem is, since the image is segmented quite close to the characters, regionprops doesn't work. Could anyone help me out with this?

This is what my output looks like:

Thank you

[Gopichandh Danala]

Try something like this, you can increase/ decrease strel size, look on imopen, imclose, imerode, imdilate for more information

img = rgb2gray(imread('lucy.jpg'));

% erode image
erodeImg = imerode(img,strel('disk',3));
figure, imshow(erodeImg,[])

% Then label
BW = bwlabel(erodeImg);
figure, imshow(BW,[])

[shru s]

Thank you so much!

[HJ Akhtar]

Can you help me for line segmentation?? I want code for that.