A Novel Deformation Transformation and Its Application to Handwritten Chinese Character Shape Correction
变形变换及其在手写体汉字整形中的应用

In this paper, a novel 1D deformation transformation for handwritten Chinese character shape correction is proposed. From our point of view, handwritten Chinese character can be regarded as a kind of deformable object. Although there are large variations in the same category of character for different handwriting styles, the basic topological structures of them are the same. With a suitable selection of deformation parameters, the 1D deformation transformation could deform a given handwritten Chinese character into 24 different handwriting styles. A deforming parameter controls the deformation degree for each style. The proposed deformation transformation could be applied as a non linear shape normalization method for Chinese character recognition to correct various position deformations such as left slanting, right slanting, top slanting, bottom slanting, too fat or too thin, etc in a handwritten Chinese character. Our experiment shows that the recognition rate can be improved by 1 5% or so by using the deformation transformation, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed transformation.