Frame deformation energy matching of on-line handwritten characters

The coarse to fine search methodology is frequently applied to a wide variety of problems in computer vision. In this paper it is shown that this strategy can be used to enhance the recognition of on-line handwritten characters. Some explicit knowledge about the structure of a handwritten character can be obtained through a structural parameterization. The Frame Deformation Energy matching (FDE) method is a method optimized to include such knowledge in the discrimination process. This paper presents a novel parameterization strategy, the Djikstra Curve Maximization (DCM) method, for the segments of the structural frame. Since this method distributes points unevenly on each segment, point-to-point matching strategies are not suitable. A new distance measure for these segment-to-segment comparisons have been developed. Experiments have been conducted with various settings for the new FDE on a large data set both with a single model matching scheme and with a kNN type template matching scheme. The results reveal that the FDE even in an ad hoc implementation is a robust matching method with recognition results well comparing to the existing state-of-the-art methods.