Online character recognition using eigen-deformations

In online character recognition based on elastic matching, such as dynamic programming matching, many of misrecognitions are often caused by overfitting, which is the phenomenon that the distance between reference pattern of an incorrect category and an input pattern is underestimated by unnatural matching. In this paper, a new recognition technique is proposed where category-specific deformations, called eigen-deformations, are utilized to suppress those misrecognitions. Generally, matching results at overfitting are not consistent with the eigen-deformations. Thus, the overfitting can be detected and penalized by a posterior evaluation of this inconsistency. The result of a recognition experiment showed the usefulness of the proposed technique.