AN EFFICIENT METHOD FOR ONLINE CURSIVE HANDWRITING STROKES REORDERING

Abstract

In the framework of online cursive handwriting recognition, we present an efficient method for reordering the sequence of strokes composing handwriting in two special cases of interest: the horizontal bar of the character "" and the dot of the character "". The proposed method exploits shape information for selecting the strokes that most likely correspond to the features of interest, and layout and topological information for locating the strokes representing the body of the characters to which the features belong to. The method does not depend on the specific algorithm used for detecting the elementary strokes in which the electronic ink may be decomposed into. The performance of our method, evaluated on a data set of cursive words produced by 50 different writers, has shown a correct reordering of the sequence in more than 85% of the cases. Thus, the proposed method allows obtaining a more stable and invariant description of the electronic ink in terms of elementary stroke sequences, and therefore can be helpfully used as a preprocessing step for both segmentation-based and word-based handwriting recognition systems.