Classification of Japanese Handwritten Characters Using Biometrics Approach

The following paper presents a solution to the problem of offline recognition of Japanese characters. Minutiae and other features extractable from handwriting images have been used to recognize individual characters. The solution presented by the authors uses minutiae to recognise single Japanese characters. Due to the complexity of this typeface, the solution presented can be used to recognise archaic characters, from old documents or also works of art. Neural Networks and hybrid classifiers based on five basic types of classifiers, i.e., k-nearest neighbour method, decision trees, support vector machine, logistic regression and Gaussian Naive Bayes classifier have been developed for classification. The study was conducted on Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji characters (ETL9G Database). The accuracy value obtained was 99.934%. The authors present what is probably the first algorithm using minutiae to recognize Japanese handwriting.