A knowledge-based stroke-matching method for Chinese character recognition

The character set used by the Chinese is greater in both size and complexity than that used by the Japanese, and experiments performed by the authors indicate that the stroke-matching algorithm of Yamamoto and Rosenfeld (1982) is too computationally intensive to be implemented for the recognition of complicated Chinese characters. A modified relaxation method that greatly reduces the computational load is proposed. The idea is to incorporate specific knowledge about the Chinese characters into the training system to remove inconsistencies with a higher efficiency and to speed up the matching process. Experimental results on the 240 most frequently used characters written by 37 different individuals showed that a fourfold improvement in speed could be achieved, making it more feasible to implement the algorithm for the recognition of complicated Chinese characters.