The field transform and its application to personal handwritten Chinese character recognition

There is a special induction field in the figures of characters which is a physiological and psychological phenomenon and is highly related to human character recognition. In this paper, a formal definition of the field transform is introduced, in which the field of a character image is simulated by a 2-dimensional scalar field which is caused by all the stroke points in the character image. If can be applied to both binary and gray-level images. A very simple character recognition approach is also proposed based on the field transform and is applied to personal handwritten Chinese character recognition. Preliminary experimental results are very promising. Further efforts should be made to find out new ways of utilizing the field transform for character recognition and other applications.