| Author: | Ip, Wai-shun Wilson |
| Title: | A character decomposition approach to offline handwritten Chinese character recognition |
| Degree: | M.Phil. |
| Year: | 1998 |
| Subject: | Optical character recognition devices Chinese character sets (Data processing) Chinese characters -- Data processing Optical pattern recognition Pattern recognition systems Optical data processing Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of Computing |
| Pages: | vii, 86 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Optical handwritten Chinese character recognition is regarded as a difficult and challenging problem. The major difficulties encountered in solving this problem are the large number of character classes, the high complexity and mutual similarity of Chinese characters, and the large variations in writing styles. In general, the recognition problem can be divided into two categories, on-line and off-line. In on-line recognition, a light pen is used to write characters on a tablet so that the strokes can be extracted orderly according to the writing sequences. Unlike on-line one, the input mechanism of off-line recognition does not offer information like positions, sequences and types of strokes. Only a 2-D character image is available for processing. Furthermore, human interaction during the recognition process is usually not available and hence the performance requirement of such system should be much higher. Since Chinese characters are composed of radicals, it is apparent to recognize radicals inside a character before recognizing the character because matching the simplified components is much easier and faster than matching the whole complex character. Despite also the fact that Chinese usually formulate their knowledge of Chinese characters as a combination of radicals, very few studies have focused on this character decomposition approach to recognition. In this research, we have adopted such an approach and the problem of how to extract radical sub-images from character images is particularly addressed. A radical extraction algorithm based on deformable templates (DTs) has been developed. Deformable templates generally possess shape-varying capability, making them particularly suitable for extracting and recognizing non-rigid objects. In fact, they have been successfully applied to problems like contour detection, motion tracking, and object matching. The application of DTs to Chinese character recognition is a novel one and concepts like goodness of character decomposition have been exploited to formulate appropriate energy terms and to devise cost effective minimization schemes for the problem. An energy function is defined to pull the decomposition template away from the strokes of a character. The template then interacts dynamically with the image to minimize the energy function, thereby deforming itself to find the best decomposition. The advantage of the character decomposition approach is demonstrated by feeding the extracted radical images to an adopted structural based Chinese character recognizer whose outputs are then combined to produce the class label of the input character. Simulation results show that the performance of the adopted Chinese character recognition system can be improved significantly when character decomposition approach is used. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| b14464494.pdf | For All Users | 3.26 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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