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Copyright © 2005 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
Special Section on Document Image Understanding and Digital Documents -- Survey Paper -- Character Recognition |
A Survey of Elastic Matching Techniques for Handwritten Character Recognition
1 The authors are with the Faculty of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University, Fukuoka-shi, 8128581 Japan. E-mail: uchida{at}is.kyushu-u.ac.jp
This paper presents a survey of elastic matching (EM) techniques employed in handwritten character recognition. EM is often called deformable template, flexible matching, or nonlinear template matching, and defined as the optimization problem of two-dimensional warping (2DW) which specifies the pixel-to-pixel correspondence between two subjected character image patterns. The pattern distance evaluated under optimized 2DW is invariant to a certain range of geometric deformations. Thus, by using the EM distance as a discriminant function, recognition systems robust to the deformations of handwritten characters can be realized. In this paper, EM techniques are classified according to the type of 2DW and the properties of each class are outlined. Several topics around EM, such as the category-dependent deformation tendency of handwritten characters, are also discussed.
Key Words: elastic matching, handwritten character recognition, deformation, optimization, survey
Manuscript received October 9, 2004.