Approaches to chinese character recognition

Work on the recognition of Chinese characters is reviewed. All of this work has been reported in just the last nine years, and most of it since 1970. The topics covered are: printed Chinese Character Recognition—Half a dozen groups have tackled this problem, using methods as varied as syntactic description, projection profiles, template matching, Fourier transforms, and hierarchical processing; handwritten Chinese Character Recognition—This is a somewhat more difficult problem. The approaches tried include a stroke generation technique and a statistical Markov chain analysis; on-line Recognition—Several investigators have reported on work in on-line Chinese character recognition. Input for on-line recognition is dynamic, using a suitable device such as a tablet. Because the strokes are isolated in time and their sequence known, this is a substantially easier recognition task; on-line Analysis—Less ambitious than on-line recognition is the on-line analysis of Chinese characters falling short of recognition. Several useful applications have been reported, including CAI and dictionarylookup. The paper is intended as a companion to a paper on formal models of the structure of Chinese characters and their application in computerized systems. Chinese characters Classification Pattern recognition Character recognition Optical character reader