Matching of complex patterns by energy minimization

Two patterns are matched by putting one on top of the other and iteratively moving their individual parts until most of their corresponding parts are aligned. An energy function and a neighborhood of influence are defined for each iteration. Initially, a large neighborhood is used such that the movements result in global features being coarsely aligned. The neighborhood size is gradually reduced in successive iterations so that finer and finer details are aligned. Encouraging results have been obtained when applied to match complex Chinese characters. It has been observed that computation increases with the square of the number of moving parts which is quite favorable compared with other algorithms. The method was applied to the recognition of handwritten Chinese characters. After performing the iterative matching, a set of similarity measures are used to measure the similarity in topological features between the input and template characters. An overall recognition rate of 96.1% is achieved.