Robust and highly customizable recognition of online handwritten Japanese characters

This paper describes a new online handwritten character recognition system which is composed of coarse classification, linear-time elastic matching, structured character pattern representation and context post-processing. It has marked 90 to 95% correct recognition rates without learning to a large database of on-line handwritten Japanese text. The recognition time is about 0.3 sec./input character on an i486 DX2/66 MHz processor. The system is not only robust to pattern distortions but also highly customizable for personal use. Upon the request of learning an input pattern, it investigates which subpattern (radical) or the pattern as a whole is non-standard, registers the (sub)pattern and extends the effect of the registration to all the character categories whose shapes include it.