A radical approach to handwritten Chinese character recognition using active handwriting models

This paper applies active handwriting models (AHM) to handwritten Chinese character recognition. Exploiting active shape models (ASM), the AHM can capture the handwriting variation from character skeletons. The AHM has the following characteristics: principal component analysis is applied to capture variations caused by handwriting, an energy functional on the basis of chamfer distance transform is introduced as a criterion to fit the model to a target character skeleton, and the dynamic tunneling algorithm (DTA) is incorporated with gradient descent to search for shape parameters. The AHM is used within a radical approach to handwritten Chinese characters recognition, which converts the complex pattern recognition problem to recognizing a small set of primitive structures-radicals. Our initial experiments are conducted on 98 radicals covering 1400 loosely-constrained Chinese character categories written by 200 different writers. The correct matching rate is 94.2% on these 2.8×10⁵ characters. Comparison with existing radical approaches shows that our method achieves superior performance.