Triangulation Based Skeletonization and Trajectory Recovery for Handwritten Character Patterns

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for trajectory recovery. Our system uses a triangulation procedure for skeletonization and graph theory to extract the trajectory. Skeletonization extracts the polyline skeleton according to the polygonal contours of the handwritten characters, and as a result, the junction becomes clear and the characters that are touching each other are separated. The approach for the trajectory recovery is based on graph theory to find the optimal path in the graph that has the best representation of the trajectory. An undirected graph model consisting of one or more strokes is constructed from a polyline skeleton. By using the polyline skeleton, our approach accelerates the process to search for an optimal path. In order to evaluate the performance, we built our own dataset, which includes testing and ground-truth. The dataset consist of thousands of handwritten characters and word images, which are extracted from five handwritten documents. To show the relative advantage of our skeletonization method, we first compare the results against those from Zhang-Suen, a state-of-the-art skeletonization method. For the trajectory recovery, we conduct a comparison using the Root Means Square Error (RMSE) and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in order to measure the error between the ground truth and the real output. The comparison reveals that our approach has better performance for both the skeletonization stage and the trajectory recovery stage. Moreover, the processing time comparison proves that our system is faster than the existing systems.