Skeletonization of decorative characters by graph spectral decomposition

Decorative characters are widely used in various scenes. Practical optical character reader is required to deal with not only common fonts but also complex designed fonts. However, since the appearances of decorated characters are complicated, most general character recognition systems cannot give good performances on decorated characters. In this paper, an algorithm that can extract character´s essential structure from a decorative character is proposed. This algorithm is applied in preprocessing of character recognition. Experimental results show character skeletons are clearly extracted from very complex decorative characters.