Extraction of peripheral shape features in Chinese character recognition

Extraction of a stable and representative set of features is the heart of the design of a pattern recognition system. Knowing the distribution of information on the pixels of a character will be of great assistance to the study of feature extraction. In this paper, an analysis of the distribution of information on the pixels of binarized Chinese characters is presented. From the analysis, it is obvious that the information of a Chinese character tends to concentrate around the peripheries of the character. Several methods to extract peripheral shape features are presented. Some experiments are conducted on Chinese character recognition and the results show the advantages of the peripheral shape features.