The recognition of Chinese characters has always been a challenging task due to their huge variety and complex structures. The latest research proves that such an enormous character set can be decomposed into a collection of about 500 fundamental Chinese radicals, and based on which this problem can be solved effectively. While with the constant advent of novel Chinese characters, the number of basic radicals is also expanding. The current methods that entirely rely on existing radicals are not flexible for identifying these novel characters and fail to recognize these Chinese characters without learning all of their radicals in the training stage. To this end, this paper proposes a novel Hippocampus-heuristic Character Recognition Network (HCRN), which references the way of hippocampus thinking, and can recognize unseen Chinese characters (namely zero-shot learning) only by training part of radicals. More specifically, the network architecture of HCRN is a new pseudo-siamese network designed by us, which can learn features from pairs of input training character samples and use them to predict unseen Chinese characters. The experimental results show that HCRN is robust and effective. It can accurately predict about 16,330 unseen testing Chinese characters relied on only 500 trained Chinese characters. The recognition accuracy of HCRN outperforms the state-of-the-art Chinese radical recognition approach by 15% (from 85.1% to 99.9%) for recognizing unseen Chinese characters.
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