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.