On-line Handwriting Chinese Character Recognition for PDA Using a Unit Reconstruction Method

In this paper, we propose the realization of on-line handwritten Chinese character recognition for mobile personal digital assistants (PDA). We focus on the development of an algorithm having a high recognition performance under the restriction that PDA requires small memory storage and less computational complexity in comparison with PC. Therefore, we use index matching method having computational advantage for fast recognition and we suggest a unit reconstruction method to minimize the memory size to store the character models and to accomodate the various changes in stroke order and stroke number of each person in handwriting Chinese characters. We set up standard model consisting of 1800 characters using a set of pre-defined units. Input data are measured by similarity among candidate characters selected on the basis of stroke numbers and region features after preprocessing and feature extracting. We consider 1800 Chinese characters adopted in the middle and high school in Korea. We take character sets of five person, written in printed style, irrespective of stroke ordering and stroke numbers. As experimental results, we obtained an average recognition time of 0.16 second per character and the successful recognition rate of 94.3% with MIPS R4000 CPU in PDA.