Role of the Sillouettes in Chinesc Character Perception

Abstract

The silhouette of a Chinese character plays a key role in visual perception of the character. Although this has empirically been well-known, no quantitative discussionhas been carried out so far on this specific characteristic of Chinese characters. This paper describes quantitative considerations on the silhouettes of Chinese characters in relation to visual perception of Chinese characters.
The basic notion is that a Chinese character, presented by a picture function, can broken down into silhouette and interior functions. Simulation of the blur effect in visual perception of characters has been carried out by spatial lowpass filtering on theFourier frequency domain.
The result of interest is that the silhouette is extremely less affected by blur than the interior. This has also been proved from an experiment regarding character legibility involving 53 subjects.