Decomposition and matching: Towards efficient automatic Chinese character stroke extraction

In this paper, given images of Chinese characters, we present an automatic stroke extraction system, which consists of character decomposition, shape matching, cross area extraction and stroke segment combination. First, a character is decomposed into isolated stroke structures according to the connection. Then, we extract shape contexts of stroke structures and find the matched counterparts in a standard database by shape matching. Cross points are computed, and cross areas are extracted according to a proposed adaptive cross area extraction method based on point-to-boundary orientation distance. For a shape structure with the matched structure, we optimize cross point set and combine its stroke segments according to the correct cross point set and combination way of its matched counterpart. For those without matched structures, we propose an angle based stroke segment combination method to combine the segments into a complete stroke. Experimental results indicate that the proposed system achieves high accuracy and demonstrates prominent augmentation on efficiency.