An efficient candidate set size reduction method for coarse-classification in Chinese handwriting recognition

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce an efficient clustering based coarse-classifier for a Chinese handwriting recognition system to accelerate the recognition procedure. We define a candidate-cluster-number for each character. The defined number indicates the within-class diversity of a character in the feature space. Based on the candidate-cluster-number of each character, we use a candidate-refining module to reduce the size of the candidate set of the coarse-classifier. Experiments show that the method effectively reduces the output set size of the coarse-classifier, while keeping the same coverage probability of the candidate set. The method has a low computation-complexity. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.