Writer Adaptation Using Bottleneck Features and Discriminative Linear Regression for Online Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition

Handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) is an important research field of pattern recognition, which has attracted extensive studies during the past decades. Recently convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods have achieved the state-of-the-art performance for handwritten Chinese character recognition. Nevertheless, handwritten Chinese character recognition is still limited to be effectively used in the actual environment due to the large-scale vocabulary and great diversity of handwriting style. In this paper, we constructed a handwritten Chinese character recognition service based on convolutional neural network, which tries to make effective use of handwritten based printed fonts and existing handwritten database. At the same time, the service can effectively collect more handwritten data to expand the training dataset, which makes it easy to adapt to the new handwriting styles. Meanwhile, We propose a multi-level recognition theory applied to online handwritten Chinese character recognition, which may improve the accuracy of handwritten Chinese character recognition and break the limitations of handwritten Chinese character recognition by identifying the structure of Chinese characters and possible stroke orders firstly. Furthermore, we try to apply the method of online character recognition to the offline character recognition based on the basic writing rules.

This paper presents a new approach to large-vocabulary online handwritten Chinese character recognition based on semi-tied covariance (STC) modeling. Detailed procedures are described for estimating the STC model parameters under both maximum likelihood (ML) and minimum classification error (MCE) criteria. Compared with the state-of-the-art modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF) based classifiers, STC-based classifiers can achieve a better memory-accuracy trade-off, thus provide more flexibility in designing compact online handwritten Chinese character recognizers. Its usefulness has been confirmed and demonstrated by comparative experiments on popular Nakayosi and Kuchibue Japanese character databases.

This paper presents a new linguistic decoding method for online handwritten Chinese character recognition. The method employs a hybrid language model which combinesN-gram and linguistic rules by rule quantification technique. The linguistic decoding algorithm consists of three stages: word lattice construction, the optimal sentence hypothesis search and self-adaptive learning mechanism. The technique has been applied to palmtop computer’s online handwritten Chinese character recognition. Samples containing millions of characters were used to test the linguistic decoder. In the open experiment, accuracy rate up to 92% is achieved, and the error rate is reduced by 68%.

In various application areas of pattern recognition, combining multiple classifiers is regarded as a method for achieving a substantial gain in performance of systems. The paper presents a method for handwritten Chinese character recognition to combine multiple classifiers based on statistics. Fusion strategies are discussed for providing a basis for combining classifiers. These combination strategies are experimentally tested on an online handwritten Chinese character recognition system. In our experiments, other combination approaches are also involved for comparison.

A new perspective: Recognizing online handwritten Chinese characters via 1-dimensional CNN

This paper proposes an on-line handwritten Chinese character recognition system based on stroke-sequence feature extraction. The character to be recognized can be stroke-order and stroke-number free, tolerance for combined strokes, size flexible, but within the constraint of normal hand-writing. Firstly, the recognizer, using the finite state matching mechanism, is used to extract primitive strokes, represented as stroke string, from the input character. Secondly, the recognizer, using a modified dynamic programming matching method, is employed to perform recognition processes with the stroke-string features. Reference patterns have been generated 2500 Chinese characters with stroke-numbers ranging from 1 to 29. The recognition results are based upon the 1800 handwritten characters by 10 people. The obtained recognition rate is 94.5%, and the cumulative classification rate of choosing fourth most similar characters is up to 98.7%. In the last part, a secondary recognition mechanism is used to further tell apart the candidates involved. The final recognition rate may be promoted up to 99%.

The hierarchical nature of Chinese characters has inspired radical-based recognition, but radical segmentation from characters remains a challenge. We previously proposed a radical-based approach for on-line handwritten Chinese character recognition, which incorporates character structure knowledge into integrated radical segmentation and recognition, and performs well on characters of left-right and up-down structures (non-special structures). In this paper, we propose a statistical-classification-based method for detecting special radicals from special-structure characters. We design 19 binary classifiers for classifying candidate radicals (groups of strokes) hypothesized from the input character. Characters with special radicals detected are recognized using special-structure models, while those without special radicals are recognized using the models for non-special structures. We applied the recognition framework to 6,763 character classes, and achieved promising recognition performance in experiments.

Bipartite weighted matching for on-line handwritten Chinese character recognition

Recognizing online handwritten Chinese characters using RNNs with new computing architectures

Recognition of handwritten Chinese characters by elastic matching

The task of handwritten Chinese character recognition is one of the most challenging areas of human handwriting classification. The main reason for this is related to the writing system itself which encompasses thousands of characters, coupled with high levels of diversity in personal writing styles and attributes. Much of the existing work for both online and off-line handwritten Chinese character recognition has focused on methods which employ feature extraction and segmentation steps. The preprocessed data from these steps form the basis for the subsequent classification and recognition phases. This paper proposes an approach for handwritten Chinese character recognition and classification using only an image alignment technique and does not require the aforementioned steps. Rather than extracting features from the image, which often means building models from very large training data, the proposed method instead uses the mean image transformations as a basis for model building. The use of an image-only model means that no subjective tuning of the feature extraction is required. In addition by employing a fuzzy-entropy-based metric, the work also entails improved ability to model different types of uncertainty. The classifier is a simple distance-based nearest neighbour classification system based on template matching. The approach is applied to a publicly available real-world database of handwritten Chinese characters and demonstrates that it can achieve high classification accuracy and is robust in the presence of noise.

A network integration method suitable for Chinese character recognition which combines traditional statistical method and artificial neural network is proposed to deal with the problems in machine recognition of handwritten Chinese characters which have the properties of large vocabulary, complex structure, lots of similar characters and variations of character shape due to handwriting. Four different classifiers for handwritten Chinese character recognition are integrated by the proposed method. The experimental results show that the method has a fast learning speed as well as high accuracy and can greatly improve the system performance.

Self-generation Voting Based Method for Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition

Offline handwritten chinese character recognition (HCCR) is one of means for quick text input and it has a great demand in the area of file recognition, form processing, machine translation and office automation. However it still is a difficult task for handwritten chinese character recognition to put into practical use because of its large stroke change, writing anomaly, and no stroke ranking information can get, etc. al. An efficient classifier occupies very important position for increasing offline HCCR ratio. Support vector machines offer a theoretically well-founded approach to automated learning of pattern classifiers for mining labeled data sets. But as we know, the performance of SVMs largely depend on the kernel function, different kernel function will produce different SVMs, and may result in different performance. However, there are no theories concerning how to choose good kernel functions based on practical using problem. In this paper we make use of the basic properties of Mercer kernel to construct a hybrid kernel from the existing common kernel, and to find the unknown parameters of the hybrid kernel in data-dependent way by minimizing the upper bound of the VC dimension of the set of functions. Our experiment results show that the proposed method is efficient compared with other classifier for handwritten Chinese character recognition.

The performance of handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) has been greatly improved by using deep learning methods in recent years. But few people pay attention to the influence of writing style on it. In this paper, we aim to improve the performance of HCCR further by weakening the influence of different writing styles. We propose a writing style adversarial network (WSAN) which includes three parts: feature extractor, character classifier and writer classifier. In the training process, we first preprocess raw image with feature extractor. Afterwards, the learned features are fed into both the character classifier and the writer classifier. We apply joint optimization on the top of these two classifiers. Specifically, we minimize the loss value of the character classifier to achieve character recognition function. At the same time, we maximize the loss value of the writer classifier to reduce the influence of writing style in HCCR. The experimental results on CASIA-HWDB1.1 prove that the proposed WSAN has a promoting effect on HCCR. And the experiments on the offline HCCR competition dataset of ICDAR-2013 also give competitive results compared with other methods.