Abstract: Structural matching is a main approach for on-line Chinese character recognition. In order to reduce its great computational complexity and improve its performance ,people have been seeking for a way to guide the whole matching by the result of partial matching. In this paper, the authors proposed 45 basic components from 3,755 categories of the daily-used Chinese characters to guide the stroke segment matching. Because they always locate at either the beginning or the end of the stroke segment string, these components are easy to extract and separate from other parts of the character. Besides, the reference templates of these components are dynamically extracted from the reference segment string and dependent on the current matched character so that a more accurate matching is carried out. Experiments show that the segment matching computation has reduced almost 50%. The approach is also enlightening for other similar object matching problem.