A new stroke-based directional feature extraction approach for handwritten Chinese character recognition

A directional feature extraction approach based on stroke directional decomposition of a Chinese character is proposed. Without extracting the skeleton or contour of the character, the four directional sub-patterns, namely, horizontal (-), vertical (|), left up diagonal (/) and right up diagonal () sub-patterns could be obtained directly from analyzing the stroke directional characteristics of the character. Five kinds of line-density based elastic meshing methods are presented to extract cellular directional features. Experimentation on a total of 18800 handwritten samples from 940 categories produces a recognition rate of 92.71%, showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach