On-line recognition of handprinted Kanji characters

Difficulties in Kanji (Chinese character) recognition stem from its large character set (about 5000 characters) and the large number of strokes (up to about sixty) in each character.

The paper describes a preliminary approach to this Kanji recognition problem. In the present method, a handprinted Kanji character is coded into a symbol string using the binary relation between stroke and reference zone. Two symbol string recognition methods are proposed and investigated; the direct matching recognition (DMR) method and the unit structure recognition (USR) method.

The DMR method worked efficiently for characters which have up to five strokes. The USR method represents Kanji characters with a structural unit combination. This method worked efficiently for multi-stroke characters and greatly reduced dictionary update labor.