Abstract
We have developed an on-line Japanese character entry system with handwriting input device for visually disabled persons (particularly, acquired blind persons). This system is composed of an electric tablet for writing a character, a hand controller for controlling the system condition, a recognition algorithm of handwritten characters and a voice synthesizer which indicates a recognized character. For characters written by visually disabled person, we already proposed a character recognition method based on the relative direction between two strokes (RDS method). The RDS method is available for characters which have many strokes. However, as the feature parameters of the RDS method are decreasing for the characters having less than 6 strokes, recognition errors are increasing. This paper investigated the improvement (fusion) method which is added the new LSDS method (the method is based on the line segment directions in a stroke) to the RDS method. From the experimental results, it is shown that the satisfactory recognition accuracy and efficiency can be obtained using this newly recognition method in the classification of Japanese characters written by visually disabled persons.
