Online recognition of freely handwritten Japanese characters using directional feature densities

Abstract

The authors propose an online handwritten Japanese character recognition method permitting both stroke number and stroke order variations. The method is based on the pattern matching technique. Matching is done by the multiple similarity method using directional feature densities, which are independent of both stroke number and stroke order. This method has achieved a good recognition rate, 91%, for 2965 freely written Japanese kanji characters.<>