Chinese character recognition: history, status and prospects

Chinese character recognition (CCR) is an important branch of pattern recognition. It was considered as an extremely difficult problem due to the very large number of categories, complicated structures, similarity between characters, and the variability of fonts or writing styles. Because of its unique technical challenges and great social needs, the last four decades witnessed the intensive research in this field and a rapid increase of successful applications. However, higher recognition performance is continuously needed to improve the existing applications and to exploit new applications. This paper first provides an overview of Chinese character recognition and the properties of Chinese characters. Some important methods and successful results in the history of Chinese character recognition are then summarized. As for classification methods, this article pays special attention to the syntactic-semantic approach for online Chinese character recognition, as well as the metasynthesis approach for discipline crossing. Finally, the remaining problems and the possible solutions are discussed.

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