Abstract: The structure of 3000 printed Chinese characters which were selectedfrom the Chinese textbook for elementary school was analysed. Each characteris divided into four quadrants i. e. upper-left (UL), upper-right (UR), bot-tom-left (BL) and bottom-right (BR).When the shapes composed of the strokesin UL and BR were the same or similar respectively they were attributed toone group and were called subpatterns. The result showed that the subpatterns of BR were more simple than thatof UL and the number of junctions of the former was less than that of thelater. The author argued that the subpatterns of BR are used as group maskin the early stage of the processing of multi-stage matching the computationtime may be reduced.

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