Online recognition of free-format Japanese handwritings

An online recognition method, called the candidate lattice method, is described for free-format written Japanese character strings, which may contain characters with separated constituents or overlapping characters. The method conducts segmentation and recognition of individual character-candidates, and applies linguistic information to determine the most probable character string to achieve high recognition rates. Special hardware designed to realize a real-time recognition system is also introduced. The method, used on special hardware, attained a segmentation rate of 98.8% and an overall recognition rate of 98.7% for 105 samples