Optical recognition of handwritten Chinese characters by hierarchical radical matching method

In this paper, a radical-based OCR system for the recognition of handwritten Chinese characters is proposed. In our approach, a recursive hierarchical scheme is developed to perform radical extraction "rst. Character features and radical features are then extracted for matching. Last, a hierarchical radical matching scheme is devised to identify the radicals embedded in an input Chinese character and recognize the input character accordingly. Experiments for radical extraction are conducted on 1856 characters. The successful rate of radical extraction is 92.5%. The average time for radical extraction is 0.65 second per character. Experiments for matching process are conducted on two sets: training set and testing set, each set includes 900 characters. The overall recognition rate in our experiments is 98.2 and 80.9% (for training set and testing set, respectively). The average recognition time of our hierarchical radical matching scheme is 0.274 s. There are totally 4716 radicals in 1800 characters. In average, one character consists of 2.62 radicals. Each character will match 7.28 radical templates in average. Thus, each radical will match 2.77 radical temples. The experimental results reveal that our proposed method is feasible, #exible, and e!ective. ( 2000 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.