An off-line large vocabulary hand-written Chinese character recognizer

An off-line hand-written Chinese character recognizer based on contextual vector quantization (CVQ) supporting a vocabulary of 4616 Chinese characters, alphanumerics and punctuation symbols has been reported. Trained with a sample for each character from each of 100 writers and tested on texts of 160000 characters written by another 200 writers, the average recognition rate is 77.2%. Two statistical language models have been investigated in this study. Their performance in terms of their capabilities in upgrading the recognition rate by 8.8% and 12.0% respectively when used as post-processors of the recognizer are reported.