HCL2000 - A Large-scale Handwritten Chinese Character Database for Handwritten Character Recognition

In this paper, we present a large scale offline handwritten Chinese character database-HCL2000 which will be made public available for the research community. The database contains 3,755 frequently used simplified Chinese-characters written by 1,000 different subjects. The writerspsila information is incorporated in the database to facilitate testing on grouping writers with different background such as age, occupation, gender, and education etc. We investigate some characteristics of writing styles from different groups of writers. We evaluate HCL2000 database using three different algorithms as a baseline. We decide to publish the database along with this paper and make it free for a research purpose.