Optical recognition of handwritten Chinese characters by partial matching

Chinese characters are basically composed of few radicals, and it is essential to recognize the radicals inside a character before recognizing the whole character. A partial matching algorithm that is based on a modified relaxation method is proposed to do radical recognition on a scanned input character. Experiments are carried out with 204 constrained handwritten characters, each containing two to five radicals, for matching 16 radical templates. The total recognition rate is 63.3%. But the rate of identifying at least one radical in a character is 97%.<<ETX>>