Automatic Correspondence Finding for Chinese Characters Using Graph Matching

Automatically establishing correspondence between Chinese characters is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel method to solve this problem. Given two Chinese characters, we first extract and properly prune the skeleton of each character to get the key points and the connectivity relations of these points. Then, the similarity between each pair of key points is calculated via the comparison of their local features. Afterwards, a set of edges are constructed by considering both the connectivity relations and k nearest neighbors (k-nn) of each point. Finally, correspondence between two characters is established by applying a guided graph matching algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for the correspondence problem of Chinese characters in both printing and handwritten styles. Moreover, we also show that our method can be utilized to automatically extract strokes from Chinese characters.