The state of the art in Japanese online handwriting recognition compared to techniques in western handwriting recognition

This paper compares the current state of the art in online Japanese character recognition with techniques in western handwriting recognition. It discusses important developments in preprocessing, classification, and postprocessing for Japanese character recognition in recent years and relates them to the developments in western handwriting recognition. Comparing eastern and western handwriting recognition techniques allows learning from very different approaches and understanding the underlying common foundations of handwriting recognition. This is very important when it comes to developing compact modules for integrated systems supporting many writing systems capable of recognizing multilanguage documents.Received: January 12, 2002, Accepted: March 6, 2003, Published online: 4 July 2003