Most Chinese characters are thought to have the same shape as their Japanese Kanji counterparts. Although this is true for most printed characters, it is not true for handwriting characters. This paper first describes the differences between handwriting character patterns in Chinese and Japanese based on an investigation of 8,063 categories of Chinese character patterns collected in Shanghai. 3,942 categories of the basic set were written by 400 people and 4,121 categories of the optional set by 50 people. Second, it is shown that Chinese characters are difficult to be recognized by adapting our original on-line Kanji recognition algorithm, because of the variety in number of strokes, stroke order and shape. Only 30/100 of the characters were written in the correct number of strokes (compared with 60/100 for Kanji), and only 80/100 of the correct samples were written in the correct stroke order. The original recognition algorithm was modified and improved to handle cursive style handwriting. The experimental results show a recognition rate of 89/100 and a 98/100 recognition rate is achieved for the 10th candidate. For practical Chinese character input, much higher recognition rates seem necessary and it is shown that a Chinese word dictionary can be used effectively together with the character recognition algorithm.
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