An evaluation of statistical methods in handwritten hangul recognition

Although structural approaches have shown better performance than statistical ones in handwritten Hangul recognition (HHR), they have not been widely used in practical applications because of their vulnerability to image degradation and high computational complexity. Statistical approaches have not received high attention in HHR because their early trials were not promising enough. The past decade has seen significant improvements in statistical recognition in handwritten character recognition, including handwritten Chinese character recognition. Nevertheless, without a systematic evaluation on the effects of statistical methods in HHR, they cannot draw enough attention because of their discouraging experience. In this study, we comprehensively evaluate state-of-the-art statistical methods in HHR. Specifically, we implemented fifteen character normalization methods, five feature extraction methods, and four classification methods and evaluated their performances on two public handwritten Hangul databases. On the SERI database, statistical methods achieved the best performance of 93.71 % accuracy, which is higher than the best result achieved by structural recognizers. On the PE92 database, which has small number of samples per class, statistical methods gave slightly lower performance than the best structural recognizer.