CASIA-OLHWDB1: A Database of Online Handwritten Chinese Characters

This paper describes a publicly available database, CASIA-OLHWDB1, for research on online handwritten Chinese character recognition. This database is the first of our series of online/offline handwritten characters and texts, collected using Anoto pen on paper. It contains unconstrained handwritten characters of 4,037 categories (3,866 Chinese characters and 171 symbols) produced by 420 persons, and 1,694,741 samples in total. It can be used for design and evaluation of character recognition algorithms and classifier design for handwritten text recognition systems. We have partitioned the samples into three grades and into training and test sets. Preliminary experiments on the database using a state-of-the-art recognizer justify the challenge of recognition.