RECOGNITION OF A HANDWRITTEN KOREAN CHARACTER BY COMBINING SEGMENTS USING CONSTRAINT SATISFYING GRAPH

Since a Korean character consists of nat-jas(graphemes), it seems natural to recognize its constituent nat-jas in order to recognize a handwritten Korean character. This paper proposes a new method which recognizes all its constituent nat-jas of a given character image. In this approach, we first decompose the image into small pieces, called segments, then reconstruct the nat-ja images by combining these segments and recognize them. In order to reduce the number of combinations of the segments to be examined, and effectively perform the recognition process, we build a constraint satisfying graph and use an efficient traversing method of the graph by making use of the human knowledge of Korean characters. An initial experimental result is given to show that the proposed approach has high potential to attack the problem of the handwritten Korean character recognition.