Recognition of hand-printed Chinese characters using decision trees/machine learning C4.5 system

Recognition of Chinese characters has been an area of major interest for many years, and a large number of research papers and reports have already been published in this area. There are several major problems with Chinese character recognition: Chinese characters are distinct and ideographic, the character size is very large and a lot of structurally similar characters exist in the character set. Thus, classification criteria are difficult to generate. This paper presents a new technique for the recognition of hand-printed Chinese characters using the C4.5 machine learning system. Conventional methods have relied on hand-constructed dictionaries which are tedious to construct and difficult to make tolerant to variation in writing styles. The paper discusses Chinese character recognition using theHough transform for feature extraction and C4.5 system. The system was tested with 900 characters written by different writers from poor to acceptable quality (each character has 40 samples) and the rate of recognition obtained was 84%.