Recognition of Handwritten Chinese Characters Based on Concept Learning

Many deep-learning character recognition methods have been developed over the past few years. Chinese characters are widely used in many countries; however, the deep-learning-based Chinese character recognition methods are faced with various problems, such as a large amount of data required for training, numerous parameters, and a large consumption of computing resources. Concept learning is a hominine learning approach. Unlike existing deep-learning models, conceptual model learning can be realized by using as little as one sample. This paper is the first to propose a handwritten Chinese character recognition method based on concept learning. Different from the existing image representation-based character recognition methods, the proposed method builds a meta stroke library with prior knowledge, and then, presents a Chinese character conceptual model based on stroke relationship learning using a character stroke extraction method and Bayesian program learning. During character recognition, Monte Carlo Markov chain sampling is utilized to obtain the character generation model for each character conceptual. This generation model can calculate the probability of the target and training characters being the same classification, and thereby determines the classification of the target character. The experimental results indicate that, with the proposed method, the conceptual model of each character can be built for character classification prediction using as few as one character sample. Our approach obtains better performance than the state-of-the-art methods on ICDAR-2013 competition dataset.