Recognition of off-line handwritten Korean characters

In this paper, we propose an on-line model-guided recognition method for off-line handwritten Korean characters. To recognize handwritten Korean characters, it is required to extract strokes and stroke sequence to describe an input two-dimensional character as one-dimensional representation. We define 28 primitive strokes and introduce 300 stroke separation rules to extract proper strokes from written Korean characters. To find a stroke sequence we use stroke codes and stroke relations between two consecutive strokes. The input character is recognized by searching the character recogniton trees with the stroke sequence. The proposed method has been tested with a set of the most frequently used 1000 characters written by 400 different writers and showed the recognition rate of 94%.