Structural analysis based stroke segmentation for Chinese characters

This paper proposes a method for stroke segmentation to decompose Chinese characters to become individual strokes. The method first obtains the medial axes of any given Chinese character for structural analysis. A fast skeletonization method using Delaunay triangulation is applied to convert the character into triangular mesh. Based on the fundamental rules and formations of Chinese characters, the mesh is rearranged to remove the spurious branches existing in the character structure. Connections between the stroke branches are decided by those with the minimum differences in various factors, including gradients of the medial axes and boundaries, as well as the widths of the branches. Strokes are then generated and completed using Bezier curves. The work included experiments to examine the algorithm.