Gray-Scale Nonlinear Shape Normalization Method for Handwritten Oriental Character Recognition

In general, nonlinear shape normalization methods for binary images have been used in order to compensate for the shape distortions of handwritten characters. However, in most document image analysis and recognition systems, a gray-scale image is first captured and digitized using a scanner or a video camera, then a binary image is extracted from the original gray-scale image using a certain extraction technique. This binarization process may remove some useful information of character images such as topological features, and introduce noises to character background. These errors are accumulated in nonlinear shape normalization step and transferred to the following feature extraction or recognition step. They may eventually cause incorrect recognition results. In this paper, we propose nonlinear shape normalization methods for gray-scale handwritten Oriental characters in order to minimize the loss of information caused by binarization and compensate for the shape distortions of characters. Two-dimensional linear interpolation technique has been extended to nonlinear space and the extended interpolation technique has been adopted in the proposed methods to enhance the quality of normalized images. In order to verify the efficiency of the proposed methods, the recognition rate, the processing time and the computational complexity of the proposed algorithms have been considered. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods are efficient not only to compensate for the shape distortions of handwritten Oriental characters but also to maintain the information in gray-scale Oriental characters.