Reconstructing Strokes and Writing Sequences from Chinese Character Images

The Chinese characters evolved from pictograms and they are composed of strokes. A standard stroke sequence for each character is available in the dictionary. People introduced heuristic rules to specify the stroke order for easy memorization but it is very ambiguous to reconstruct the dictionary sequence according to the heuristic rules. In this paper, we combine the stroke extraction and stroke sequence reconstruction algorithms to reconstruct the strokes and their sequence from a Chinese character image. A well-known public Chinese character database (the HITPU database) is used as our input data. Performance evaluation shows the robustness of our proposed method and user evaluation shows that our proposed system helps users to create online Chinese character templates quickly and conveniently.