A STROKE EXTRACTION METHOD FOR MULTIFONT CHINESE CHARACTERS BASED ON THE REDUCED SPECIAL INTERVAL GRAPH

The small scope of vision is a fatal problem for a machine to recognize an unknown object. Therefore, how to enlarge the scope of vision is an important thing in pattern recognition. In this correspondence, we describe a new method for representation of an image pattern, which we call the Reduced Special Interval. Graph (RSIG). Any binary image pattern can be easily converted into a RSIG. Based on the RSIG, we can enlarge the scope of vision and process a much greater zone of the image. This helps us properly extract the feature of the image and identify the image pattern. We apply the RSIG to help us extract the strokes of Chinese characters by incorporating some knowledge about the structure of Chinese characters. The found this method can not only heuristically extract strokes but also heuristically eliminate noises including those added to strokes for the artistic sake. Some experimental results of stroke extraction for different fonts of machine printed and hand-printed Chinese characters are shown. These results reveal that the method based on the RSIG can extract the strokes of Chinese characters effectively and efficiently. Moreover, the RSIG can be applied to many other application areas, and it is an effective representation method in pattern recognition and image processing.