A structural model of continuous transformation of handwritten characters

An essential problem in handwriting recognition is how to cope with complex shape deformation, and therefore, the modeling of the deformation and its metamorphosis (transformation of an instance of a class into an instance of the other class via continuous transformation) is a key to breaking through the difficulties in handwriting recognition. Based on the structural feature extraction and description by Nishida (1995), we present a model for structural deformation with simple, local operations that preserve the global structure of the shape. Furthermore, we present an experimental approach to the analysis of metamorphosis of character shapes based on the structural deformation model.