On-line recognition of handwritten Chinese characters and alphabets

An online handwritten-character recognition system is proposed based on stroke-sequence feature extraction and on a string-matching method called the dynamic neighboring matching method. The patterns to be recognized, including Chinese characters and alphabets, are allowed to be stroke-order- and stroke-number-free and tolerant of combined strokes and wrong strokes. Fewer learning samples are needed, but they must be within the constraint of normal handwriting. Reference patterns have been generated from 4000 categories of characters with stroke numbers ranging from 1 to 31. The recognition results are based upon the 3500 Chinese characters written by 10 people. The recognition rate is 93.5%, and the cumulative classification rate of choosing four most-similar characters is up to 98.5%