New Advances and New Challenges in On-Line Handwriting Recognition and Electronic Ink Management

Abstract

The main goal of this chapter is to make an overview of new advances in on-line handwriting recognition systems, electronic ink management systems, open problems, new challenges and new perspectives. In the recent years, several papers dealing with surveys or states of the art in on-line handwriting recognition have been published; namely: − for western languages by: Faure and Lecolinet [1], Guyon and War-wick [2], Plamondon [3], Guyon, Schenkel and Denker [4], Plamondon, Lopresti, Schomaker and Srihari [5], Plamondon and Srihari [6]; a study on the question of “Handwriting Recognition or Reading?” has also been proposed by Lorette [7]; − for Chinese by: Liu, Jager and Nakagawa [8]; − for Japanese by: Jaeger, Liu and Nakagawa [9]. During the last years the main new trends in on-line pen-based digital devices were: − Extension of on-line handwriting recognition to the recognition of large or very large vocabularies; − Widening of the domain from on-line handwriting recognition systems to the composition of on-line composite documents containing hand-writing, graphics, drawings and symbols; − Ink management in documents,