Invited Paper.

This paper describes a printed Thai character recognition method which uses topological properties. The recognition system is divided into two stages. In the rough classification stage, a thinning technique is applied to eliminate noise and fine features. The thinned characters are separated into cluster domains by using a linear decision function based on the height and width of each character. In the fine classification stage, the ‘connected numbers’ of points in the character pattern are computed. Topological properties are then used to distinguish between the characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]