A method of generating template patterns from a few sample patterns in character recognition

To recognize a character using a pattern matching method, it is necessary to prepare sufficiently many sample patterns for a template pattern. However, it is difficult to collect a sufficient number of samples of some characters because they do not appear often. This paper proposes a new method of estimating a template pattern using the transfer function in a frequency range which is considered generally to be useful in such a case. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated experimentally by using the printed Devanagari characters (in Buddhist literature) as an example.