An on-line Japanese character recognition method using length-based stroke correspondence algorithm

Because most Japanese characters consist of several strokes, many recognition methods determine stroke correspondence before calculating the distance between the input character and the template character. When the writing style is cursive, however, the stroke number is changeable. If stroke numbers differ between the input and template characters, stroke correspondence is not one-to-one, and it is not easy to determine the correspondence. The method proposed, uses stroke length, because these lengths are relatively stable even when the writing is cursive. The calculation of recognition using stroke lengths is faster than that of recognition using other multidimensional feature values such as the coordinates. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.