Handwritten character recognition using piecewise linear two-dimensional warping

The effectiveness of piecewise linear 2D warping, a dynamic programming-based elastic image matching technique, in handwritten character recognition is investigated. The technique presented is capable of providing compensation for most variations in character patterns with tractable computation. The superiority of the present technique over several conventional 2D warping techniques in variation compensation is experimentally justified. Another comparison with monotonic and continuous 2D warping, a more flexible matching technique, reveals that the method presented takes far less computation than the latter, yet provides almost the same recognition accuracy for most categories.