Model-based stroke extraction and matching for handwritten Chinese character recognition

This paper proposes a model-based structural matching method for handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR). This method is able to obtain reliable stroke correspondence and enable structural interpretation. In the model base, the reference character of each category is described in an attributed relational graph (ARG). The input character is described with feature points and line segments. The strokes and inter-stroke relations of input character are not determined until being matched with a reference character. The structural matching is accomplished in two stages: candidate stroke extraction and consistent matching. All candidate input strokes to match the reference strokes are extracted by line following and then the consistent matching is achieved by heuristic search. Some structural postprocessing operations are applied to improve the stroke correspondence. Recognition experiments were implemented on an image database collected in KAIST, and promising results have been achieved. 2001 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.