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%.