Characters as graphs: Interpretable handwritten Chinese character recognition via Pyramid Graph Transformer

•A novel skeleton graph is proposed to represent handwritten characters.•A novel Pyramid Graph Transformer (PyGT) is proposed for modeling graphs.•PyGT is more interpretable and superior to prevalent approaches for HCCR.•PyGT is generic for online and offline handwritten character recognition.•PyGT can be feasibly extended to handwritten text recognition.