The objective of recovering writing order is to extract dynamic handwriting information from static text images

which can be seen as to convert a 2-dimensional image into sequences of 1-dimensional vectors of pentip positions along the time axis. This paper proposes a model for recovering writing order from offline handwritten Chinese character. In this model

a 4-layer hierarchy is presented to model each Chinese character

where character

component

subcomponent and stroke are located at each layer

respectively. Characters are decomposed into components and each component is decomposed to subcomponents in turn by four decomposing operators. The totally-ordered relations between subcomponents are retrieved by defining the corresponding rules between decomposed relations and a poset of subcomponents. Subcomponents are the basic recovering primitives in this model

whose writing orders are recovered by classifying strokes and pairs of crossing strokes. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective and accurate.