Recognition of handwritten Chinese characters by elastic matching

A method was proposed to match handwritten Chinese character patterns. Two given patterns are iteratively deformed until they match. An energy function and a neighborhood of influence is defined for each iteration. Initially a large neighborhood is used such that the movements result in large features being coarsely aligned. The neighborhood size is gradually reduced in successive iterations so that finer and finer details are aligned. The amount of computation increases with the square of the number of moving parts which is quite favorable compared with other algorithms. Extensive testing was carried out to evaluate the performance of the algorithm under various parameter settings. The method was applied to the recognition of handwritten Chinese characters with satisfactory results.