A handwritten character recognition system using hierarchical displacement extraction algorithm

A handwritten character recognition system using the hierarchical algorithm to extract displacement between a template pattern and an input pattern is proposed. In the proposed system, the displacement can be computed by Gauss-Seidel iteration derived from Euler-Lagrange equations of the energy functional, which consists of a correspondence error between patterns and a smoothness constraint of the extracted displacement. To extract both global and local deformations included in input patterns, the hierarchical structure is introduced. In computer experiments, the recognition performance is clarified. In addition, the relation between the ability of displacement extraction and the recognition performance when the correspondence error is used as the distance is discussed. Finally, we show that it is possible to improve the recognition performance by using both the correspondence error and the smoothness of the extracted displacement as the distance