Getting rid of leftover lines

To get rid of the leftover lines, I expand a rectangle starting in the middle of the character image and stop it when the sum of each rectangle edge is at a maximum (has the most white space).

One issue is that the size of the character boxes will vary now, but hopefully I will be able to correct this by zero padding the images (or 1 padding...).

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Here are some examples of before and after removing the leftover lines. The images on the top half of the figures are after, and on the bottom are before.

Good example of 'a':


Good 'b' example:


Bad 'a' example: