Subjective Evaluation of Hand-written Character Quality

Abstract

This paper describes subjective factors in evaluating the quality of hand-written Kanji characters. Ten Japanese subjects were asked to rate the character quality of each example on a 5-point scale : very neat, neat, fair, poor, very poor. The subjects were given 2 trials. First, the score and the standard deviation of each example were calculated. The results show that evaluations in the range of very neat and very poor are more stable than in the range of fair. It is suggested that some characters were easily judged and others which were not. Second, the correlation coefficients for the 2 trials for each character varied. However, the relationship between the character and correlation coefficient is not clear.