In this paper

a novel 1D deformation transformation for handwritten Chinese character shape correction is proposed. From our point of view

handwritten Chinese character can be regarded as a kind of deformable object. Although there are large variations in the same category of character for different handwriting styles

the basic topological structures of them are the same. With a suitable selection of deformation parameters

the 1D deformation transformation could deform a given handwritten Chinese character into 24 different handwriting styles. A deforming parameter controls the deformation degree for each style. The proposed deformation transformation could be applied as a non linear shape normalization method for Chinese character recognition to correct various position deformations such as left slanting

right slanting

top slanting

bottom slanting

too fat or too thin

etc in a handwritten Chinese character. Our experiment shows that the recognition rate can be improved by 1 5% or so by using the deformation transformation

demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed transformation.