Recognizing on-line handwritten Chinese character via FARG matching

The paper presents a novel method for online handwritten Chinese character recognition. In our method, each category of character is described by a fuzzy attributed relational graph (FARG). A relaxation algorithm is developed to match the input pattern with every FARG. For decision making, a similarity measure is established via statistical technique to calculate the matching degree between the input pattern and referenced FARG, according to which the recognition result is determined. The principle of our method makes it very robust against stroke connection and stroke order variation as well as stroke shape deformation. A database of 22530 samples collected from 6 subjects is used to test our recognition system which can recognize 3755 categories of Chinese characters. The result shows that our method is very effective: a top 1 recognition rate of 98.8% and a top 10 of 99.7% are reached.