Recognizing characters in Chinese seal images is important when researching ancient cultural artworks because the seals may contain critical historical information. However, owing to large intraclass variance and a limited number of training samples, recognizing such characters in Chinese seals is challenging. Thus, this study proposes a graph-matching-based method to recognize characters in historical Chinese seal images. In the proposed method, a Chinese seal character is first modeled as a

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... aph representing its underlying geometric structure. Then, two affinity matrices that measure the similarity of nodes and edge pairs are calculated with their local features. Finally, a correspondence matrix is calculated using a graph matching algorithm and the most similar reference is selected as the recognition result. Compared with several existing classification methods for seal image recognition, the proposed graph-matching-based method achieves better results, particularly in the case of limited samples.