Database of on-line Japanese characters

[Lambert Schomaker <schomaker@NICI.KUN.NL>]

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Dear Colleague

This is an announcement of the availability of on-line handwritten
Japanese character pattern database for research purposes
without charges.

Due to the copyright of the Japanese newspaper from which the text
was used to collect hand-written characters, the data made available
at this time is only less than 10% of the total database, but we
hope it is useful for evaluation purposes.

The environment that this database is accessed needs to support
a Japanese character code system and font in the operating system
(Windows, Japanese version). Please note that all the manuals are
written in Japanese at the moment and we cannot respond to each
request to translate them.  We hope that you can ask someone in
your group who can read Japanese.

Details are in the following page:
http://hands.ei.tuat.ac.jp/ipdb/

In order to make the total database available for unlimited
applications, the newspaper company requests us to pay 2% of the
sale.  However, Japanese national universities are not so
free to sell their products. Nevertheless, we are trying to find
a solution.

The total database stores 300 million character patterns so that
it could be used for practical developments.

Masaki Nakagawa

Dept. of Computer, Information and Communication Sciences
Tokyo Univ. of Agri. & Tech.
Naka-cho 2-24-16, Koganei, Tokyo, 184-8588, Japan
phone: +81-423-88-7144, fax: +81-423-87-4604
e-mail: nakagawa@cc.tuat.ac.jp
http://www.tuat.ac.jp/~nakagawa/