A new approach for recognizing multifont Chinese characters used in a special application

Many approaches for recognizing all of the 5401 commonly used Chinese characters have been proposed, but they are complex, For some applications such as cheques, receipts, addresses, in Chinese, etc., only a limited set of printed characters is needed, but they are usually require a real time response and a high recognition rate. Based on this reason, here we provide a simpler approach to meet these two requirements. The approach takes horizontal strokes, vertical ones and crossings among these strokes as the character features. A fast modified Hough transform is provided to extract these features, it satisfies an important stroke property that a dotted line must not be a real stroke. In the learning stage, an error measure is defined and an optimal stroke matching algorithm is proposed to establish an accurate random model for each type of characters. In the recognition stage, another error measure is defined and a nearly-optimal matching algorithm is presented to speed up the recognition process. It is worth mentioning that the approach does not use any thinning process. Some experimental results are also provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed recognizer.