Thinning and stroke segmentation for handwritten Chinese character recognition

Firstly, a thinning technique by means of stroke tracking is proposed. The method is considered to preserve the straightness of strokes and the length, which is useful for the stroke segmentation procedure on the recognition of handwritten Chinese characters.Secondly, a method for stroke segmentation, i.c. a way of breaking down a character to a set of consecutive partial strokes, is proposed, which works well owing to the favourable properties of the proposed thinning technique. The method consists of five procedures: extraction of feature pixels, calculation of stroke directions, piecewise linear representation of strokes, unification of intersections and extraction of the consecutive partial strokes.