A Stroke-Segment-Mesh (SSM) Glyph Description Method of Chinese Characters

In the field of Chinese characters information processing,there are drawbacks in the current description method of computerized Chinese character glyph, especially on the aspect of feature selection and computation for comparing glyphs, which cause many problems, such as the input of wrongly written characters, variant forms of characters in ancient literatures, and combined characters and automatic glyph comparison. This research offers an application oriented description method of Chinese character glyphs, which possesses the characteristics of suitable granular degree, ambiguity-free, and standardized basic units and which can be applied in the description of any possible different glyph skeletons (including wrongly written characters, variant form of a Chinese character, and combined characters). This research also offers the classifications of simple strokes, compound strokes, algorithms of automatic stroke extraction and structural relation computation based on stroke-segment-smesh of glyphs. The experiment indicates that this method can be applied in the descriptive input of any glyph and computation for comparing either the whole or part of glyphs. Therefore it can support Chinese character input of any glyphs by descriptive drawing and the description of wrongly written characters or the quantitative analysis of misused characters in the teaching and research of Chinese characters, the description and analysis of variant forms of characters in ancient literatures, or the retrieval of rare character glyphs in the electronic books.