End-point preserved stroke extraction

The stroke is a very important feature for a character and is helpful for word recognition and handwriting identification. Although thinning algorithms can be applied for stroke extraction, they always suffer from the problems of bifurcation and disconnection. Moreover, since the end points of strokes cannot be preserved by thinning, the stroke length cannot be accurately determined and the start and the end parts of a stroke, which are useful for identifying the writing habit of a person, are hard to be extracted explicitly. In this paper, we proposed a very accurate stroke extraction algorithm which can well preserve the ends of strokes. Simulations on some Chinese characters show that the proposed algorithm is reliable and can precisely extract the strokes of characters.