Recognition of handwritten Chinese characters by searching the multiway heterogeneous tree

The number of Chinese characters is very large, frequently it exceeds 5000 in daily usage. In order to achieve accuracy and speed in the recognition of handwritten Chinese characters, it is essential to have a well-organized model database. In the paper, the structural and statistical information of Chinese characters are represented by hierarchical attributed graphs. A heterogeneous multiway tree structure is used to organize the model database. For an input character, a corresponding model character in the database is found by a search process which can be divided into a number of simple and local decisions at different levels of the tree. The matching process becomes quite efficient and accurate