An Empirical Comparative Study of Online Handwriting Chinese Character Recognition: Simplified vs. Traditional

There are two forms of Chinese character widely used in the world, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese is mainly used in Chinese mainland, Singapore, Malaysia and other Southeast Asian regions, while traditional Chinese is mainly used in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Japan and so on. The simplified Chinese is transformed from traditional Chinese by simplifying the character structure and reducing the stoke number of many traditional characters, while a few remain unchanged. The simplified Chinese reduces the memory storage and makes handwriting become more convenient, while it also brings the problem that many characters are so similar that they are difficult to be recognized. In this paper, an empirical study of the handwriting simplified/traditional Chinese character recognition are carried out in order to compare the difference between these two forms of Chinese characters. The experimental results based on SCUT-Couch2009 database show that the handwriting recognition accuracy of traditional Chinese is higher than simplified Chinese, for both unchanged part and changed part. This interesting finding may bring us some cues on the issue of confusable Chinese character recognition for further study.