Similarity searching for on-line handwritten documents

Abstract

With the increasing pervasion of computers, the handwriting seemed to forfeit its position as the primary way of permanent expression of humans ideas; typed texts appeared as the new and better solution. However, with the today’s rise of modern pen based computer devices (e.g. TabletPC), we may see a renaissance of the traditional handwriting in the digital world. More and more electronic documents will be written with pens directly on the screen. One of the benefits of digital documents in comparison to paper, is the convenience of automated document management, including retrieval. For example, full text search in large amounts of sheets of papers is a time-consuming task in the analog world, while modern search engines demonstrate everyday the simplicity of the same task in the future digital world. The continuous breakthrough of digital handwriting will require search possibilities as they exist for typed documents. This paper discusses problems related to search in digital handwriting data and describes a novel approach to solve this searching problem.