Identification of fork points on the skeletons of handwritten Chinese characters

This paper describes techniques for stroke extraction used in the recognition of handwritten Chinese characters. A new set of feature points is proposed for the analysis of skeleton images. Based on a geometrical graph, a novel criterion is proposed for the identification of fork points in a skeleton image which correspond to joint points in the original character image. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method correctly determines the fork points, and is effective in unifying the joint points.