how to merge two near bounding boxes ?

Hello everyone

I'm trying to do the segmentation of symbols in an arabic mathematical equation. Here is the code :

clc
clear all, close all;
%% Image segmentation and extraction%% Get file from folder 
[filename,pathname]=uigetfile('*','Load an Image');
%% Read Image
imagen=imread(fullfile(pathname,filename));

%% Show image
figure(1)
imshow(imagen);
title('INPUT IMAGE WITH NOISE')

%% Convert to gray scale
if size(imagen,3)==3 % RGB image
    image=rgb2gray(imagen);
end

%% Convert to binary image
threshold = graythresh(image);
image1 =~im2bw(image,threshold);

%% Show image binary image
figure(2)
imshow(~image1);
title('INPUT IMAGE WITHOUT NOISE')

%% Label connected components
[L Nb]=bwlabel(image1);
%% Measure properties of image regions
bboxes=regionprops(L,'BoundingBox');
hold on

%% Plot Bounding Box
for n=1:size(bboxes,1)
    rectangle('Position',bboxes(n).BoundingBox,'EdgeColor','r','LineWidth',0.5)
end
hold off
pause (1)

%% Objects extraction
figure(3)
for n=1:Nb
    [r,c] = find(L==n);
    n1=image1(min(r):max(r),min(c):max(c));
    imshow(~n1);
    pause(0.5)
end

%% Merge overlapping boxes
boxes = cat(1, bboxes.BoundingBox);
xmin = boxes(:,1);
ymin = boxes(:,2);
xmax = xmin + boxes(:,3) - 1;
ymax = ymin + boxes(:,4) - 1;
overlapRatio = bboxOverlapRatio(boxes, boxes);
n = size(overlapRatio,1); 
overlapRatio(1:n+1:n^2) = 0;
g = graph(overlapRatio);
componentIndices = conncomp(g);
xmin = accumarray(componentIndices', xmin, [], @min);
ymin = accumarray(componentIndices', ymin, [], @min);
xmax = accumarray(componentIndices', xmax, [], @max);
ymax = accumarray(componentIndices', ymax, [], @max);
% Compose the merged bounding boxes using the [x y width height] format.
textBBoxes = [xmin ymin xmax-xmin+1 ymax-ymin+1];
ITextRegion = insertShape(image, 'Rectangle', textBBoxes,'LineWidth',2);
figure
imshow(ITextRegion)

this code works and merge boxes if they are overlapping.

My problem is that arabic letters often contain points. For example :

so when segmenting this letter it will give tow different boxes (symbols), just like this :

I want to merge them in order to get just one box (symbol).

thank you in advance for your help.