A Mobile Chinese Character Image Recognition Platform

People may have difficulty in reading Chinese books because there always exist some unfamiliar Chinese characters, so it would be valuable if an application can help users including foreigners to learn them. This paper presents a platform based on mobile devices for helping people to recognize the unfamiliar characters at any time or any place. Firstly, we collect various dataset of Chinese characters to build a complete character set, then create the image library according to that set by segmenting. Secondly, the so-called GIST and SIFT features are extracted from the image library to establish feature library. To improve the recognition performance, we filter the SIFT feature points of similar images obtained by GIST feature matching. Finally, compress the storage of GIST and SIFT descriptors to accommodate mobile platform with Similarity Sensitive Coding (SSC) algorithm. At the stage of recognition, the high-dimensional indexing algorithm is applied in finding the top k Chinese characters similar to the image of unfamiliar character by GIST feature, which has the strong versatility and the extension malleability. Then these characters are reordered by SIFT feature matching. The final recognition result is based on the locations of each character in GIST and SIFT matching result respectively. We apply that algorithm in Android platform. It shows great performance in recognition and gives smooth experience to users.