Elastic Structural Matching for On-line Handwritten Alphanumeric Character Recognition

Abstract

In this paper, we will propose a simple yet robust structural approach for recognizing on-line handwriting. Our approach is designed to achieve reasonable speed, fairly high accuracy and sufficient tolerance to variations. Experimental results show that the recognition rates are 98.60% for digits, 98.49% for uppercase letters, 97.44% for lowercase letters, and 97.40% for the combined set. When the rejected cases are excluded from the calculation, the rates can be increased to 99.93%, 99.53%, 98.55% and 98.07%, respectively. On the average, the recognition speed is about 7.5 characters per second running in Prolog on a Sun SPARC 10 Unix workstation and the memory requirement is reasonably low. 1. Introduction Character recognition has been an active research area for more than 30 years [12]. Different approaches, such as statistical, syntactic and structural, and neural network approaches, have been proposed. Characters consist of line segments and curves. Different spatial arrangement...