Drawing Order Recovery for Handwriting Chinese Characters

Bocheng Zhao, Minghao Yang, Jianhua Tao

Abstract: Recover drawing orders from a Chinese handwriting image is a challenge issue. Most of English drawing order recovery(DOR) methods perform unsatisfactorily in Chinese. This paper proposes a novel image-to-sequence algorithm to deal with Chinese DOR problem. The proposed method utilizes two regression convolution neural network(CNN) models to generate two corresponding pen-tip movement heat-maps. To estimate pen-tip movement for most of the normal states in writing process, the algorithm analyzes the above two heat-maps with a specifically designed framework. Then the drawing order is restored through a simple iteration process based on the proposed framework. Experiments on public online handwriting database show that our method have got a remarkable result for Chinese DOR tasks. In addition, for English tasks, our method performs superiorly among state-of-the-art methods.