A New Approach for Synthesis and Recognition of Large Scale Handwritten Chinese Words

Lacking of dataset is still a serious problem for researchers who study on online handwriting word recognition (HWR). In this paper, a handwritten Chinese word synthesis method is proposed for the first time to generate a large scale handwritten Chinese word dataset. The distributions of shape and position characteristics, such as aspect radio, character interval and the angle of gravity center line in each word sample of the Word8888 dataset have been estimated respectively. Based on this, we synthesize as large as 44,208 categories of 8,311,104 unconstrained handwritten Chinese word samples. To verify the validity of the synthesized dataset, a practical rotation free handwriting Chinese word recognition system is presented based on a new holistic approach. Experimental results for randomly rotated word samples demonstrate that the holistic approach can achieve 91.96% recognition accuracy, which provides evidence for the effectiveness of our method.