Chinese characters have a huge set of character categories, more than 20,000 and the number is still increasing as more and more novel characters continue being created. However, the enormous characters can be decomposed into a compact set of about 500 fundamental and structural radicals. This paper introduces a novel radical analysis network (RAN) to recognize printed Chinese characters by identifying radicals and analyzing two-dimensional spatial structures among them. The proposed RAN first extracts visual features from input by employing convolutional neural networks as an encoder. Then a decoder based on recurrent neural networks is employed, aiming at generating captions of Chinese characters by detecting radicals and two-dimensional structures through a spatial attention mechanism. The manner of treating a Chinese character as a composition of radicals rather than a single character class largely reduces the size of vocabulary and enables RAN to possess the ability of recognizing unseen Chinese character classes, namely zero-shot learning.
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