A New Method on the Segmentation and Recognition of Chinese Characters for Automatic Chinese Seal Imprint Retrieval

In this paper, we propose a new method on the segmentation and recognition of Chinese characters in both circular and elliptical seals for automatic Chinese seal imprint retrieval. The seal identification system compares an input seal image with its model seal. However, the model seal is usually found manually, which costs quite a lot of time and this manual stage has become the bottleneck of automatic seal identification. In addition, traditional automatic methods which were designed for circular seal imprint retrieval cannot work well for elliptical seal images. In order to overcome these shortcomings, our method first fits the contour of seal images and then automatically classifies them into either circular seal shape or elliptical seal shape. After that, we apply different methods for Chinese character segmentation and skew correction with circular and elliptical seal shape images respectively. Finally, we use our classifier combination strategy to recognize the Chinese characters on Chinese seal images. Once optical character recognition (OCR) is done, a model seal imprint corresponding to its input sample seal image is retrieved for verification from the seal imprint database. Experimental results show that our method has better performance than traditional ones.