Chinese character recognition: a twenty-five-year retrospective

The author assesses the current status of the field and places the problem of Chinese recognition into perspective with other areas of optical character recognition. Early experiments are briefly reviewed, and sources of more up-to-date information, including review articles, are indicated, advances in computer technology are discussed that have had a significant impact on the problem, and a sampling of relatively recent research on the classification of both printed and handprinted ideographs is presented. Included in the discussion are techniques of preprocessing (character location and segmentation) and hierarchical classification.<>