A deformable elastic matching model for handwritten Chinese character recognition

This paper describes a deformable elastic matching approach to handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR). Handwritten character is regarded as a kind of deformable object, with elastic property. For the same category of character, we assume that different handwriting variations share the same topological structure, but may differ in shape details. The variations between different handwriting characters are modelled by a set of stroke displacement vectors (SDV). According to the SDV derived, a model character is deformed gradually, in an effort to transform itself much closer to an input character. Experiments show that the proposed elastic matching model can efficiently deal with local shape changes and variations between characters.