  Recently, great progress has been made for online handwritten Chinese
character recognition due to the emergence of deep learning techniques.
However, previous research mostly treated each Chinese character as one class
without explicitly considering its inherent structure, namely the radical
components with complicated geometry. In this study, we propose a novel
trajectory-based radical analysis network (TRAN) to firstly identify radicals
and analyze two-dimensional structures among radicals simultaneously, then
recognize Chinese characters by generating captions of them based on the
analysis of their internal radicals. The proposed TRAN employs recurrent neural
networks (RNNs) as both an encoder and a decoder. The RNN encoder makes full
use of online information by directly transforming handwriting trajectory into
high-level features. The RNN decoder aims at generating the caption by
detecting radicals and spatial structures through an attention model. The
manner of treating a Chinese character as a two-dimensional composition of
radicals can reduce the size of vocabulary and enable TRAN to possess the
capability of recognizing unseen Chinese character classes, only if the
corresponding radicals have been seen. Evaluated on CASIA-OLHWDB database, the
proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art
whole-character modeling approach with a relative character error rate (CER)
reduction of 10%. Meanwhile, for the case of recognition of 500 unseen Chinese
characters, TRAN can achieve a character accuracy of about 60% while the
traditional whole-character method has no capability to handle them.
