Shape decomposition and skeleton extraction of character patterns

This paper proposes an approach to extract skeletons from the character patterns. It first decomposes the pattern into a set of near-convex parts and then extracts skeletons from the parts. In shape decomposition stage, the convex hull information is used to identify the splitting paths. For the skeleton extraction, an operation that ties the adjacent strokes by a knot is developed. Our control procedure processes a variety of different situations of the adjacent strokes in a systematic way.