A study on the use of 8-directional features for online handwritten Chinese character recognition

This paper presents a study of using 8-directional features for online handwritten Chinese character recognition. Given an online handwritten character sample, a series of processing steps, including linear size normalization, adding imaginary strokes, nonlinear shape normalization, equidistance resampling, and smoothing, are performed to derive a 64×64 normalized online character sample. Then, 8-directional features are extracted from each online trajectory point, and 8 directional pattern images are generated accordingly, from which blurred directional features are extracted at 8×8 uniformly sampled locations using a filter derived from the Gaussian envelope of a Gabor filter. Finally, a 512-dimensional vector of raw features is formed. Extensive experiments on the task of recognizing 3755 level-1 Chinese characters in GB2312-80 standard are performed to compare and discern the best setting for several algorithmic choices and control parameters. The effectiveness of the studied approach is confirmed.