A formalization of on-line handwritten Japanese text recognition free from line direction constraint

This work presents a formalization of an on-line writing-box free, line-direction free handwritten Japanese text recognition and its effect. By normalizing character orientation, even text of arbitrary character orientation can be recognized. The method evaluates the likelihood composed of character segmentation, character recognition, character pattern structure and context. The likelihood of character pattern structure considers the plausible height, width and gaps within a character pattern that appear in Chinese characters composed of multiple radicals (subpatterns). We show how the newly modeled factors in the likelihood affect the overall recognition rate.