MATCHING OF COMPLEX PATTERNS BY ENERGY MINIMIZATION

Two patterns are matched by putting one on top of the other and iterat ively moving their individual parts until most of their corresponding parts are aligned. An energy function and a neighborhood of influence are defined for each iteration. Initially, a large neighborhood is use d such that the movements result in global features being coarsely ali gned. The neighborhood size is gradually reduced in successive iterati ons so that finer and finer details are aligned. Encouraging results h ave been obtained when applied to match complex Chinese characters. It has been observed that computation increases with the square of the n umber of moving parts which is quite favorable compared with other alg orithms. The method was applied to the recognition of handwritten Chin ese characters, After performing the iterative matching, a set of simi larity measures are used to measure the similarity in topological feat ures between the input and template characters, An overall recognition rate of 96.1% is achieved.