An efficient knowledge-based stroke extraction method for multi-font chinese characters

摘要

Feature extraction is the most important thing in pattern recognition. Whether it is good or not affects the recognition rate seriously. Selecting the strokes as the features to describe a Chinese character is indeed a powerful approach. But it also suffers from the difficulty of stroke extraction. In this paper, some knowledge about strokes is derived by studying the structure of Chinese characters. This knowledge is then applied to help extract the strokes. The method cannot only heuristically extract strokes but can also heuristically eliminate noises including those added to strokes for artistic sake. Moreover, this method does not use any preprocessing like thinning or other transformations, so its extraction speed is very fast.