The Hellinger-Kakutani metric for pattern recognition

Feature extraction and pattern classification are two key components in a pattern recognition system. In our approach, each image is represented by a 2D Fourier descriptor which is translation-, rotation-, and scale-invariant. We define a new metric, named the Hellinger-Kakutani metric for measuring the distance between two Fourier descriptors for classification. This metric is filtration-invariant, hence can be used on noisy images. The method is applied to a set of 22 Chinese characters, which contains 7 subsets of similar characters. The rate of accurate recognition is then reported.