Using a geometric-based sketch recognition approach to sketch chinese radicals

Unlike English, where unfamiliar words can be queried for its meaning by typing out its letters, the analogous operation in Chinese is far from trivial due to the nature of its written language. One approach for querying Chinese characters involve referencing their dictionary component called radicals. This is advantageous since users would not need to know their pronunciation nor their stroke-order, a requirement in other querying approaches. Currently though, sketching a character's radical for querying is an unsupported capability in existing systems. Using the geometric-based LADDER sketching language combined with the Sezgin low-level recognizer, we were able to construct an application which can first recognize handwritten sketches of Chinese radical, and then output candidate Chinese characters which contain that radical. Thus, we were able to demonstrate that a geometric-based sketch recognition approach can be used to easily build applications for recognizing symbols related to Chinese characters while having reasonable recognition rates. Unlike current image-based recognition systems, our system also maintains stroke order information of characters. Since stroke order is important in written Chinese, our system can be easily expanded for use in Chinese language education by providing visual feedback to students on correct stroke order.

Using a geometric-based sketch recognition approach to sketch chinese radicals Conference Paper