Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
2. There are some stylistic differences between the characters written
by left-handed and right-handed writers;
3. There are different classes of handwriting styles according to the
spacing between characters, or the lack of it: on some printed forms
all the characters are written in guideline boxes; some writers sepa-
rate their characters by a significant space; some run on their char-
acters so they touch each other; while in “cursive” writing all the
letters in one word are connected. Most natural handwriting styles
are a mixture of discrete and cursive styles.
In the first stage of an automatic recognition process, the features of a
written character are enhanced and then extracted from their images, al-
lowing the shape of the character to be stored. In addition to the shape of
a character, a recognition system might possess information about how a
character was written—the type of pen strokes used, whether the pen re-
traced any strokes during the writing of a character, etc. This “dynamic”
information, which is often available when the writer is using an elec-
tronic tablet or when he is writing with a stylus on a PDA screen, can also
include the writing direction and the writing order of the strokes. The
numbers stored for each of the pixels in the recognition image merely
confirm whether or not the point of the pen visited the location corre-
sponding to a particular pixel, but it is not always clear from this data
which pixels belong to which strokes, or even what is the number of
strokes in a written character.
The Parascript System
A successful natural handwriting technology was developed in the Soviet
Union beginning in the late 1960s. After a long break in this research
effort, interest in the problem was revived in the mid-1980s, by Israel
Gelfand at the USSR Academy of Science, one of several young scientists
and programmers who were keen on solving “unsolvable” problems. A
group led by Stefan Pachikov attacked the problem and subsequently
founded ParaGraph International, whose NHR 4 technology is employed
in Parascript, a market leader in the field. The underlying idea of NHR is
to use the fact that cursive handwriting is a series of movements made by
a writing instrument. Each movement can be represented by one or more
4 NHR is a trademark of Parascript, LLC.
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