Thinning and stroke segmentation for handwritten Chinese character recognition

Firstly, a thinning technique by means of stroke tracking is proposed. The method is considered to preserve the straightness of strokes and the length, which is useful for the stroke segmentation procedure on the recognition of handwritten Chinese characters.Secondly, a method for stroke segmentation, i.c. a way of breaking down a character to a set of consecutive partial strokes, is proposed, which works well owing to the favourable properties of the proposed thinning technique. The method consists of five procedures: extraction of feature pixels, calculation of stroke directions, piecewise linear representation of strokes, unification of intersections and extraction of the consecutive partial strokes.     

Local reference lines for handwritten phrase recognition

Reference line information has been used for diverse purposes in handwriting research, including word case classification, OCR, and holistic word recognition. In this paper, we argue that the commonly used global reference lines are inadequate for many handwritten phrase recognition applications. Individual words may be written at different orientations or vertically displaced with respect to one another. A function used to approximate the implicit baseline will not be differentiable or even continuous at some points. We have presented the case for local reference lines and illustrate its successful use in a system that verifies street name phrases in a postal application.     

Real-time arabic handwritten character recognition

This paper considers the development of a real-time Arabic handwritten character recognition system. The shape of an Arabic character depends on its position in a given word. The system assumes that characters result from a reliable segmentation stage, thus, the position of the character is known a priori. Thus, four different sets of character shapes have been independently considered. Each set is further divided into four subsets depending on the number of strokes in the character. The system has been heavily tested and the average recognition rate has been found to be 99.6% where most of the misrecognized characters were actually written with little care. Thus, the system can be reliably used for the recognition of on-line handwritten characters entered via a graphic tablet.     

Genetic engineering of hierarchical fuzzy regional representations for handwritten character recognition

This paper presents a genetic programming based approach for optimizing the feature extraction step of a handwritten character recognizer. This recognizer uses a simple multilayer perceptron as a classifier and operates on a hierarchical feature space of orientation, curvature, and center of mass primitives. The nodes of the hierarchy represent rectangular sub-regions of their parent node, the tree root corresponding to the character's bounding box. Within each sub-region, a variable number of fuzzy features are extracted. Genetic programming is used to simultaneously learn the best hierarchy and the best combination of fuzzy features. Moreover, the fuzzy features are not predetermined, they are inferred from the evolution process which runs a two-objective selection operator. The first objective maximizes the recognition rate, and the second minimizes the feature space size. Results on Unipen data show that, using this approach, robust representations could be obtained that out-performed comparable human designed hierarchical fuzzy regional representations.     

Modeling inverse covariance matrices by expansion of tied basis matrices for online handwritten Chinese character recognition

The state-of-the-art modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF) based approach for online handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) assumes that the feature vectors of each character class can be modeled by a Gaussian distribution with a mean vector and a full covariance matrix. In order to achieve a high recognition accuracy, enough number of leading eigenvectors of the covariance matrix have to be retained in MQDF. This paper presents a new approach to modeling each inverse covariance matrix by basis expansion, where expansion coefficients are character-dependent while a common set of basis matrices are shared by all the character classes. Consequently, our approach can achieve a much better accuracy–memory tradeoff. The usefulness of the proposed approach to designing compact HCCR systems has been confirmed and demonstrated by comparative experiments on popular Nakayosi and Kuchibue Japanese character databases.     

Offline handwritten Amharic word recognition

This paper describes two approaches for Amharic word recognition in unconstrained handwritten text using HMMs. The first approach builds word models from concatenated features of constituent characters and in the second method HMMs of constituent characters are concatenated to form word model. In both cases, the features used for training and recognition are a set of primitive strokes and their spatial relationships. The recognition system does not require segmentation of characters but requires text line detection and extraction of structural features, which is done by making use of direction field tensor. The performance of the recognition system is tested by a dataset of unconstrained handwritten documents collected from various sources, and promising results are obtained.     

Preprocessing for Chinese character recognition and global classification of handwritten Chinese characters

Techniques for calculating the stroke directions of thinned binary characters and for detecting the intersections and end points of strokes by means of pattern matching and weighting method are proposed as a preprocessing of handwritten Chinese character recognition. We also propose a method for global classification of handwritten Chinese characters by means of projection profiles of strokes and show that the method is available for the Chinese characters written in the square style.     

A trainable feature extractor for handwritten digit recognition

This article focuses on the problems of feature extraction and the recognition of handwritten digits. A trainable feature extractor based on the LeNet5 convolutional neural network architecture is introduced to solve the first problem in a black box scheme without prior knowledge on the data. The classification task is performed by support vector machines to enhance the generalization ability of LeNet5. In order to increase the recognition rate, new training samples are generated by affine transformations and elastic distortions. Experiments are performed on the well-known MNIST database to validate the method and the results show that the system can outperform both SVMs and LeNet5 while providing performances comparable to the best performance on this database. Moreover, an analysis of the errors is conducted to discuss possible means of enhancement and their limitations.     

Zoning methods for handwritten character recognition: A survey

This paper presents a survey on zoning methods for handwritten character recognition. Through the analysis of the relevant literature in the field, the most valuable zoning methods are presented in terms of both topologies and membership functions. Throughout the paper, diverse zoning topologies are presented based on both static and adaptive approaches. Concerning static approaches, uniform and non-uniform zoning strategies are discussed. When adaptive zonings are considered, manual and automatic strategies for optimal zoning design are illustrated as well as the most appropriate zoning representation techniques. In addition, the role of membership functions for zoning-based classification is highlighted and the diverse approaches to membership function selection are presented. Concerning global membership functions, the paper introduces order-based approaches as well as fuzzy approaches using border-based and ranked-based fuzzy membership values. Concerning local membership functions, the recent parameter-based approaches are described, in which the optimal membership-function is selected for each zone of the zoning method. Finally, a comparative analysis on the performance of zoning methods is presented and the most interesting approaches are focused on in terms of topology design and membership function selection. A list of selected references is provided as a useful tool for interested researchers working in the field.     

A novel stroke-based feature extraction for handwritten Chinese character recognition

A stroke-based approach to extract skeletons and structural features for handwritten Chinese character recognition is proposed. We first determine stroke directions based on the directional run-length information of binary character patterns. According to the stroke directions and their adjacent relationships, we split strokes into stroke and fork segments, and then extract the skeletons of the stroke segments called skeleton segments. After all skeleton segments are extracted, fork segments are processed to find the fork points and fork degrees. Skeleton segments that touch a fork segment are connected at the fork point, and all connected skeleton segments form the character skeleton. According to the extracted skeletons and fork points, we can extract primitive strokes and stroke direction maps for recognition. A simple classifier based on the stroke direction map is presented to recognize regular and rotated characters to verify the ability of the proposed feature extraction for handwritten Chinese character recognition. Several experiments are carried out, and the experimental results show that the proposed approach can easily and effectively extract skeletons and structural features, and works well for handwritten Chinese character recognition.     

Off-line handwritten Korean character recognition based on stroke extraction and representation

In this paper, we propose an off-line recognition method for handwritten Korean characters based on stroke extraction and representation. To recognize handwritten Korean characters, it is required to extract strokes and stroke sequence to describe an input of two-dimensional character as one-dimensional representation. We define 28 primitive strokes to represent characters and introduce 300 stroke separation rules to extract proper strokes from Korean characters. To find a stroke sequence, we use stroke code and stroke relationship between consecutive strokes. The input characters are recognized by using character recognition trees. The proposed method has been tested for the most frequently used 1000 characters by 400 different writers and showed recognition rate of 94.3%.     

Gabor filters-based feature extraction for character recognition

A new method using Gabor filters for character recognition in gray-scale images is proposed in this paper. Features are extracted directly from gray-scale character images by Gabor filters which are specially designed from statistical information of character structures. An adaptive sigmoid function is applied to the outputs of Gabor filters to achieve better performance on low-quality images. In order to enhance the discriminability of the extracted features, the positive and the negative real parts of the outputs from the Gabor filters are used separately to construct histogram features. Experiments show us that the proposed method has excellent performance on both low-quality machine-printed character recognition and cursive handwritten character recognition.     

A multiple agent architecture for handwritten text recognition

This paper investigates the automatic reading of unconstrained omni-writer handwritten texts. It shows how to endow the reading system with learning faculties necessary to adapt the recognition to each writer's handwriting. In the first part of this paper, we explain how the recognition system can be adapted to a current handwriting by exploiting the graphical context defined by the writer's invariants. This adaptation is guaranteed by activating interaction links over the whole text between the recognition procedures of word entities and those of letter entities. In the second part, we justify the need of an open multiple-agent architecture to support the implementation of such a principle of adaptation. The proposed platform allows to plug expert treatments dedicated to handwriting analysis. We show that this platform helps to implement specific collaboration or cooperation schemes between agents which bring out new trends in the automatic reading of handwritten texts.     

Some experiments in the evaluation of a character recognition scanner

For character recognition machines in which the design of the logic is time consuming and expensive, a method for evaluating the character recognition scanner prior to designing the recognition logic is desirable. A method for evaluating a character recognition scanner by evaluating the patterns it produces is described. The method, for a given set of parameters, assigns to each pattern a figure of merit that measures the difficulty of recognizing the pattern. A number of experiments show that the evaluation method produced results comparable to results produced by a recognition logic designed by engineers. On a sample of 81,200 patterns, the evaluation method showed in this experiment that 0.20% of the patterns would be difficult to recognize, while for the same patterns, logic designed by engineers failed to recognize or misrecognized 0.24% of the patterns.     

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 significantly by using the eigen-deformations for the detection of overfitting, which is the main cause of the misrecognition in the elastic matching based recognition methods.     

基于统计部首模型的联机手写汉字识别方法

利用汉字的部首层次结构有助于减小字符识别器的存储空间和提高泛化性、适应性,但部首分割一直是一个难点.提出一种新的基于部首的联机手写汉字识别方法,该方法把部首形状信息和几何信息集成到识别框架中,在组合搜索过程中利用字符-部首的层次结构字典引导部首的分割与识别,从而提高部首分割的准确率.为克服部首间的连笔,引入角点检测提取子笔划.部首识别采用统计分类器,模型参数通过自学习得到.在字符识别中,采用了2种不同的字典表示以及相应的不同搜索算法.该方法已用于左右与上下结构的字符集,实验结果表明了该方法的有效性.