Structural decomposition and description of printed and handwritten characters

A structural method for describing both printed and handwritten characters is presented in this paper. In this approach, each character is decomposed into primitives based on feature points detection, where a new directional point is introduced and an improved scheme for the bend point detection is proposed. Each primitive is then characterized by a so-called primitive code. A global code is derived from the primitive codes, which is used to describe the topological structure of the character. Each character is thus completely described by the primitive codes and the global code. This method has been successfully applied in handwritten numeral and printed character recognition