An improved handwritten Chinese character recognition system using support vector machine

This paper describes several techniques improving a Chinese character recognition system. Enhanced nonlinear normalization, feature extraction and tuning kernel parameters of support vector machine on a large data set with thousands of classes, contribute to improvement of the overall system performance. The enhanced nonlinear normalization method not only solves the aliasing problem in the original Yamada et al.'s nonlinear normalization method but also avoids the undue stroke distortion in the peripheral region of the normalized image. The support vector machine is for the first time tested on a large data set composed of several million samples and thousands of classes. The recognition system has achieved a high recognition rate of 99.0% on ETL9B, a handwritten Chinese character database. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.