Skeleton chain coding for Chinese characters

The compression of Chinese characters is very important for Chinese office automation and desktop publishing. In this paper, various methods are used to compress 13,051 Chinese characters losslessly by coding their skeleton points. The skeleton points are composed of isolated points and curves. To trace every point in a curve once and consecutively is a NP problem. Therefore, we use contour path following and revisiting algorithms to trace skeleton curves with chain codes. The remaining isolated skeleton points are encoded by an Elias code. Our coding method has a better compression rate than that of conventional skeleton coding.