Recognition of handwritten Chinese characters by combining regularization, Fisher's discriminant and distorted sample generation

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, 2009, p. 1026–1030The problem of offline handwritten Chinese character recognition has been extensively studied by many researchers and very high recognition rates have been reported. In this paper, we propose to further boost the recognition rate by incorporating a distortion model that artificially generates a huge number of virtual training samples from existing ones. We achieve a record high recognition rate of 99.46% on the ETL-9B database. Traditionally, when the dimension of the feature vector is high and the number of training samples is not sufficient, the remedies are to (i) regularize the class covariance matrices in the discriminant functions, (ii) employ Fisher's dimension reduction technique to reduce the feature dimension, and (iii) generate a huge number of virtual training samples from existing ones. The second contribution of this paper is the investigation of the relative effectiveness of these three methods for boosting the recognition rate. © 2009 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

A study on the use of Gabor features for Chinese OCR

The authors revisit the topic of Gabor feature extraction for Chinese OCR. We adopt a very simple discriminant function to construct a maximum discriminant function based character recognizer. We experiment with a simple way of forming a feature vector for each character image by extracting Gabor features using one wavelength at locations uniformly sampled with one spatial resolution. Extensive experiments on large vocabulary Chinese OCR for both machine-printed and handwritten characters are performed by using a large amount of training and testing data to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Gabor features for Chinese OCR. Using Gabor features as raw features, we have constructed several state-of-the-art Chinese OCR engines.published_or_final_versio

A scheme of on-line Chinese character recognition using neural networks

[[abstract]]The paper proposes a scheme of online Chinese character recognition, based on neural networks. The supervised backpropagation algorithm is used to train the network. The input character is converted as a sequence of virtual stroke segments as well as real stroke segments, which is a good feature exactly describing the complete structure of a character, and is to be extracted by our system. In order to simplify the recognition process and reduce the recognition time, the neural network is divided into several subnetworks. Each of them is responsible for recognizing a group of about 75 character patterns. In other words, the huge set of Chinese characters is divided into several groups according to the numbers of stroke segments in the characters, and for each group of characters, a specific subnetwork is trained in order to recognize every character in the group. Whenever the system accepts an input Chinese character, it will calculate the number of stroke segments, including virtual stroke segments as well as real stroke segments in that character, and then determine which subnets to enter for recognition process. The system is allowed to accept and recognize some interconnected characters. The algorithm was experimentally implemented in a personal computer system, it accepts interconnected Chinese characters written on an electronic tablet, and performs recognition in real time. Our experiment showed that recognition accuracy exceeded 96% on the test example.[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]19971012~19971015[[booktype]]紙本[[conferencelocation]]Orlando, FL, US