Directional pattern matching for character recognition revisited

Directional features have been successfully used forthe recognition of both machine-printed and handwrittenKanji characters for the last decade. This paper attemptsto explain why the directional features are effective. First,the advances of directional features and related methodsare briefly reviewed. Then the properties that thesimilarity measure should hold are discussed andsimulation experiments of directional pattern matchingare conducted to validate the properties. This analysis isexpected to inspire the design of new and more effectivefeatures.