Evaluating the Stability of Digital Ink Chinese Characters from CFL Beginners Based on Center of Gravity Guided by Calligraphy

Beginners to Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) lack the awareness of Chinese orthography, treat Chinese characters as polyline shapes, and often suffer from unstable characters written. It is widely accepted that computing the center of gravity of Chinese character (CGCC) is an effective way to evaluate the writing performance. This paper proposes a CGCC computation approach by analyzing the Chinese character writing behaviors of CFL beginners combined with calligraphy theory to support Chinese character stability evaluation of CFL beginners. A CGCC database is also constructed with character stability information such as CGCC coordinates and computation approaches. The stability of Chinese characters from CFL beginners is quantitatively evaluated by comparing the deviation of center of gravity (CG) and the aspect ratio of handwriting characters with that of templates. Experiments with digital ink character data from CFL beginners have shown that the proposed approach is effective.