Computing the Slant Degree of Digital Ink Chinese Characters Handwritten by CFL Beginners Based on Elliptical Enclosing Shape

∗The shape of the Chinese character should be square and not slanted in its overall presentation. Beginners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) often tend to write slanted characters as they have not yet fully grasped the writing techniques of the strokes and the relationship between them. Slant deviation in handwritten characters is usually assessed manually, which is time-consuming and subjective as there are no quantitative criteria. Existing methods of computing the slant membership of Chinese characters are mainly based on the angle of individual strokes, ignoring other conformational factors that affect the overall slant of the character. This paper proposes a slant membership computation approach for handwritten Chinese characters based on elliptical enclosing shapes, with the aim of computing the slant membership that reflects the combination of all Chinese strokes. A knowledge base is also constructed to label the slant information of standard template characters, and the slant membership of handwritten characters is computed by comparing the differences between them with the template characters in the knowledge base. Experiments conducted with digital ink character data from CFL beginners proved that the proposed approach is effective.