Eigen-deformations for elastic matching based handwritten character recognition

Deformations in handwritten characters have category-dependent tendencies. In this paper, the estimation and the utilization of such tendencies called eigen-deformations are investigated for the better performance of elastic matching based handwritten character recognition. The eigen-deformations are estimated by the principal component analysis of actual deformations automatically collected by the elastic matching. From experimental results it was shown that typical deformations of each category can be extracted as the eigen-deformations. It was also shown that the recognition performance can be improved signi3cantly by using the eigen-deformations for the detection of over3tting, which is the main cause of the misrecognition in the elastic matching based recognition methods. ? 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.