Online handwritten Chinese character recognition; comparison and improvement to Japanese Kanji recognition

Abstract

The online Japanese character recognition system was developed for the pen based mobile computer "Japanese AMITY" of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. The online Chinese character recognition system has been developed for "Chinese AMITY". Most Chinese characters have the same shapes as the Japanese Kanji characters, if they are in the same category. This is roughly true for printed characters but is not true for the online handwritten characters. This paper describes the differences between the handwritten Chinese characters and Japanese characters. It is shown that Chinese characters are difficult to be recognized by adapting our original online Kanji recognition algorithm because of their varieties in the number of strokes, the order of strokes and shapes. So we have modified and improved the recognition algorithm. The experimental results obtained are presented.