Online Handwriting Recognition for Indic Scripts

Abstract

Online handwriting recognition refers to the problem of machine recognition of handwriting captured in the form of pen trajectories. The recognition technology holds significant promise for Indic scripts, given that the Indic languages are used by a sixth of the world’s population, and the greater ease of use of handwriting-based text input for these scripts compared to keyboard-based methods. Even though the recognition of handwritten Devanagari, Bangla, and Tamil has received significant attention in recent times, one may say that research efforts directed at Indic script recognition in general are in their early stages. The structure of the scripts and the variety of shapes and writing styles pose challenges that are different from other scripts and hence require customized techniques for feature representation and recognition. In this chapter, we describe the challenges in recognizing online handwriting in Indic scripts and provide an overview of the state of the art for isolated character and word recognition. We then present in brief some of the promising applications, starting with handwriting-based text input systems (IMEs) that have been built for entering Indic scripts. In the last section, we provide a few pointers to resources such as tools and data sets that are currently available for online Indic script recognition research. endabstract