Flash it read it: A Chinese character flashcard recognizer

This paper proposes a Chinese character flashcard recognizer for kids learning purposes. Firstly, the system will capture an image of the flashcard shown to the webcam. Secondly, a preprocessing procedure based on thresholding is performed to remove noisy edges and convert the color image into binary image. Subsequently, a Principal Component Analysis based feature extraction is conducted to encode the image into a compact representation. Lastly, character recognition is performed using Euclidean distance. The kids are able to learn Chinese characters with their Pinyin and meaning using the system. From the experiments, promising recognition results are achieved.