A two-stage online handwritten Chinese character segmentation algorithm based on dynamic programming

In this paper, an online handwritten Chinese character segmentation method is proposed. It is based on a dynamic programming algorithm, which uses geometrical features extracted from the handwritten strokes. The algorithm is carried out in two stages: pre-segmentation and recognition-based segmentation. The experimental results on 2363 sentences, representing nearly 70,000 characters and more than 370,000 strokes, show that the pre-segmentation stage keeps incorrect segmentation rate below 1% with an over-segmentation rate limited to 11%. The final correct segmentation rate is about 88%, without using any language model, indicating the effectiveness of proposed approach.