JLect Japanese Handwriting Recognition Tool (JLect JHR)

(c) Zachary Read | JLect.com
2013-2024

Table of contents

• JLect Japanese Handwriting Recognition Tool (JLect JHR)
  • What is it?
  • Live demo
  • License
  • Advantages and disadvantages
  • Contributing

What is it?

JLect JHR is a JavaScript library that provides support for Japanese handwritten character recognition. Users can draw a character in a defined HTML canvas element and the library will output guesses based on stroke direction.

Example:

Live demo

For a live demo, please check out https://zacharyread.github.io/jlect-jhr/example.html

For an example implementation, you can visit https://www.jlect.com and click on the "字 (draw)" button beside the search bar.

License

The library and all associated files provided in the official repository are covered by the following Creative Commons license:

• Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Advantages and disadvantages

Pros:

• The library is open-sourced, so anyone can contribute to the project to improve it and anyone can use it as long as the license conditions are met.
• The library has no dependencies, which makes it easy to deploy in comparison to other tools.
• The library can be easily modified and expanded. The "example.html" file provides data output that you can use to expand the existing dataset.
• The library, while being stroke-oriented, considers the fact that users are likely to draw characters in the wrong stroke order.

Cons:

• The library is stroke-oriented and does not handle cursive character input.
• The dataset is incomplete, so it may fail at recognizing a fair number of characters.
• It only supports drawing one character at a time.

Contributing

I strongly encourage anyone who uses the library to contribute back to the project: https://github.com/ZacharyRead/jlect-jhr.