Distance between histograms of angular measurements and its application to handwritten character similarity

The similarity between two histograms has attracted many researchers in various fields. The type of histograms to be matched is often angular such as gradient directions in character images and hue values in color images. The distance between two angular type histograms differs from those of nominal or ordinal type histograms; however, conventional distance measures do not distinguish them. Thus we present a new algorithm to compute the newly proposed distance. We describe how to apply the distance to handwritten character similarity.