Identification of fork points on the skeletons of handwritten Chinese characters

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