METHOD AND DEVICE FOR HANDWRITTEN LETTER RECOGNITION

A handwritten letter recognition method in accordance with the present invention detects, for each subset, input strokes that coincide with the standard strokes, according to the order of the standard strokes of a standard pattern, and carries out in turn the coincidence processing of strokes by removing the coincident input strokes from the input pattern. The recognition processing for the input patterns is carried out by extracting the standard patterns possessing standard strokes that are coincident for all of the strokes of the input pattern. Therefore, it becomes possible to recognize the input letter pattern easily and efficiently without regard to the order of the strokes input, and even for an input letter pattern with large number of strokes. Moreover, the coincidence detection processing of the strokes can be executed easily and accurately even for the case when the number of strokes that form a letter patterns is large or the case of complicated pattern form, since it detects input strokes that will coincide next, by removing the input strokes that are detected as coincident from the input pattern, to extract a standard pattern all of whose strokes coincide for each and every subset.