QuickStroke: An Incremental On-Line Chinese Handwriting Recognition System

This paper presents QuickStroke: a system for the incremental recognition of handwritten Chinese characters. Only a few strokes of an ideogram need to be entered in order for a character to be successfully recognized. Incremental recognition is a new approach for on-line recognition of ideographic characters. It allows a user to enter characters a factor of 2 times faster than systems that require entry of full characters. Incremental recognition is performed by a two-stage system which utilizes 68 neural networks with more than 5 million free parameters. To enable incremental recognition, we use specialized time-delay neural networks (TDNNs) that are trained to recognize partial characters. To boost the recognition accuracy of complete characters, we also use standard fully-connected neural networks. Quickstroke is 97.3% accurate for the incremental writer-independent recognition of 4400 simplified GB Chinese ideograms.