Offline handwritten Chinese character recognition via radical extraction and recognition

Despite the facts that Chinese characters are composed of radicals and Chinese usually formulate their knowledge of Chinese characters as a combination of radicals, very few studies have focused on a character decomposition approach to recognition, i.e., recognizing a character by first extracting and recognizing its radicals. In this paper, such an approach is adopted and the problem of how to extract radical sub-images from character images is particularly addressed. A radical extraction algorithm based on deformable templates (DTs) has been developed. The advantage of the character decomposition approach is demonstrated by feeding the extracted radical images to an adopted structural based Chinese character recognizer whose outputs are then combined to produce the class label of the input character. Simulation results show that the performance of the adopted Chinese character recognition system can be improved significantly when character decomposition approach is used.