Gaussian process style transfer mapping for historical Chinese character recognition

Historical Chinese character recognition is very important to larger scale historical document digitalization, but is a very challenging problem due to lack of labeled training samples. This paper proposes a novel nonlinear transfer learning method, namely Gaussian Process Style Transfer Mapping (GP-STM). The GP-STM extends traditional linear Style Transfer Mapping (STM) by using Gaussian process and kernel methods. With GP-STM, existing printed Chinese character samples are used to help the recognition of historical Chinese characters. To demonstrate this framework, we compare feature extraction methods, train a modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF) classifier on printed Chinese character samples, and implement the GP-STM model on Dunhuang historical documents. Various kernels and parameters are explored, and the impact of the number of training samples is evaluated. Experimental results show that accuracy increases by nearly 15 percentage points (from 42.8% to 57.5%) using GP-STM, with an improvement of more than 8 percentage points (from 49.2% to 57.5%) compared to the STM approach.