Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition with Directional Decomposition Cellular Features

A new feature extraction approach based on elastic meshing and directional decomposition techniques for handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) is proposed in this letter. It is found that to decompose a Chinese character into horizontal, vertical stroke, left slant and right slant directional sub-pattenrs is very helpful for feature extraction and recognition. Three kinds of decomposition methods are proposed. A minimum distance classifier is trained by 3755 categories of characters using the new features. Testing on total 37,550 untrained handwritten samples produces the recognition rate of 92.36%, showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.