Recognizing components of handwritten characters by attributed relational graphs with stable features

We present a method for Chinese character component recognition. We use an attributed relational graph model to describe a component. This model allows us to express the knowledge of the component shape and can include stable features of the component in various writing styles and various characters. We then describe a method to extract graph representation of an input character. The graph models are used to recognize components from a whole character by subgraph isomorphism. Our method need not segment component from character and can tolerate links and overlaps between a component and the other part. Experiments for handwritten Chinese characters show its efficiency.