This study proposes a detection method of bilateral symmetry for Chinese characters that combines different types of character features, such as scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) and contour information. A directed graph is constructed with the basic symmetric elements of a character to describe the enhancement
relationships among the elements. Furthermore, the detection of the most significant axes of symmetry in one character is transformed into the problem of finding star subgraphs with local maximum weight. Experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods on Chinese characters database.