Abstract This paper presents a benchmark, which includes a manually-constructed database and evaluation tools.
Specifically, the database contains a number of images of Chinese characters represented in four commonly-used
font styles and corresponding stroke images manually segmented from character images. Performance of a given
stroke extraction method can be evaluated by calculating dissimilarities of the automatic segmentation results and
the ground truth using two specially-designed metrics. Moreover, the authors also propose a new method based on
Delaunay triangulation to effectively extract strokes from Chinese characters. Experimental results obtained by
comparing three algorithms demonstrate that the benchmark works well for the evaluation of stroke extraction
approaches and the proposed method performs considerably well in the application of stroke extraction for Chinese
characters.