On-line Japanese character recognition experiments by an off-line method based on normalization-cooperated feature extraction

It is shown that an offline character recognition method is effective for use in an online Japanese character recognition. Major conventional online recognition methods have restricted the number and the order of strokes. The offline method removes these restrictions, based on pattern matching of orientation feature patterns. It has been improved with developments in nonlinear shape normalization, nonlinear pattern matching, and the normalization-cooperated feature extraction method. It was used to examine 52,944 online Kanji characters in 1,064 categories. The recognition rate achieved 95.1%, and the cumulation recognition rate within the best five candidates was 99.3%