Structural recognition of ancient Chinese ideographic characters

Ancient Chinese characters, typically the ideographic characters on bones and bronze before Shang Dynasty(16th—11th century B.C.), are valuable culture legacy of history. However the recognition of Ancient Chinese characters has been the task of paleography experts for long. With the help of modern computer technique, everyone can expect to be able to recognize the characters and understand the ancient inscriptions. This research is aimed to help people recognize and understand those ancient Chinese characters by combining Chinese paleography theory and computer information processing technology. Based on the analysis of ancient character features, a method for structural character recognition is proposed. The important characteristics of strokes and basic components or radicals used in recognition are introduced in detail. A system was implemented based on above method to show the effectiveness of the method.