An Investigation of Imaginary Stroke Techinique for Cursive Online Handwriting Chinese Character Recognition

Imaginary stroke technique has been proved to be an effective solution to the problem of the stroke connection in online handwritten character recognition. However, it may cause confusions among characters with similar but actually different trajectories after adding imaginary strokes. In this paper, we first investigate both the benefit and the defect of the imaginary stroke technique, and then two modified methods are proposed under the framework of feature fusion and local feature enhance respectively. With the proposed methods, the feature of imaginary strokes is employed to unify the writing styles and the feature of real strokes is enhanced to strengthen discriminability. Experimental results for handwritten Chinese character recognition indicate that comparing with feature without imaginary strokes and feature with imaginary strokes, our proposed methods provide about 3%~8% and 1%~4% recognition accuracy improvement respectively.