Optical recognition of handwritten Chinese characters: Advances since 1980

The work on the optical recognition of handwritten Chinese characters which has been reported since 1980 is reviewed. The various methods used are classified according to the feature and comparison methods employed. Particular attention is paid to models developed under the recently introduced connectionist paradigm. As an area with sufficient challenge, considerable application potential, and extensive test data, handwritten Chinese character recognition is a good testbed for new recognition algorithms. It therefore enables connectionist models to be compared with more traditional recognition methods.