Typeface identification for printed Chinese characters

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a methodology for identifying typefaces of printed Chinese characters in documents. Three kinds of features, stroke width means, stroke width variations, and aspect ratio, are first used to classify character typefaces as: Black, Li, Kai-Round, or Ming-Song. Each of the last two groups contains two typefaces. Vertical/horizontal stroke width ratios are used to distinguish between the Ming and Song typefaces and accumulative pixel ratio to distinguish between the Kai and Round typefaces. Six different typeface feature distributions measured from 5401 printed Chinese characters are considered, and a trapezoid-shaped membership function is constructed for each distribution. Based on these membership functions, we determine what typeface each input character belongs to using a two-level decision tree. To increase the identification rate, the typeface of a certain character is adjusted according to the typeface identification results of the front and the next characters. In the character recognition system, we use two statistical features: crossing counts and contour directional counts. We achieved an 89.87% typeface identification rate in our experiments, and a 95.60% character recognition rate.