A segmentation method for handwritten Japanese character lines based on transitional information

The authors propose a method to segment a character line image into individual character images and recognize them. To segment Japanese handwriting accurately, it is necessary to use character recognition results and contexts. However, recognition results might be wrong, or recognition confidence scores might be inaccurate. Dictionary consulting is not sufficient to deal with such ambiguous character recognition results. The paper reports on a method which hierarchically uses transitional information and a word dictionary for recognition results for all possible characters. Experimental results show that, for character line samples written roughly, 91.7% recognition rate is achieved while the recognition rate for a method without transitional information is 78.3%