A novel stroke extraction method for Chinese characters using Gabor filters

A robust stroke extraction method for Chinese characters is essential to off-line character recognition systems, which depend on stroke structure analysis to function. This study presents a novel stroke extraction method based on a directional filtering technique for extracting reliable and undistorted stroke segments. First, a set of Gabor filters is used to break down an image of a character into different directional features. Next, a new iterative thresholding technique that minimizes the reconstruction error is proposed to recover stroke shape. Finally, a refinement process based on measuring the degree of stroke overlap is used to remove redundant stroke pieces. Experimental results show that the proposed method cannot only provide immunity against the junction-distortion and spurious-branch problems associated with a thinning-based process, but is also insensitive to shape deformation and noise. (C) 2002 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.