Handwriting Recognition

[Ian Dickinson]

Hi

My name is Ian Dickinson and I am a professional software developer working in the UK and reasonably familiar with Python.

However a friend of mine who is a special educational needs teacher was asking me if I could write some handwriting recognition software for her, which would allow here pupils to write their input directly on a graphics tablet and then have this input converted to a text sting for further processing. The handwriting would be distinct letters either upper or lower case but not joined up writing. I would like to help out here as I think this is a valuable and worthwhile area of education so has anyone out there got any advice that could help me out.


Thanks in advance

Ian

 

[gregpinero]

However a friend of mine who is a special educational needs teacher was asking me if I could write some handwriting recognition software for her, which would allow here pupils to write their input directly on a graphics tablet and then have this input converted to a text sting for further processing. The handwriting would be distinct letters either upper or lower case but not joined up writing. I would like to help out here as I think this is a valuable and worthwhile area of education so has anyone out there got any advice that could help me out.

Sure you just use the handwriting recognition library:

import handwriting
....

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-handwriting.html

ha ha, I kid, I kid.

I don't think this is an easy problem to solve. You'd probably want
Python to be a wrapper around whatever hand-writing recognition
software you find or buy. I know handwriting recognition software can
read the hand-writing on checks, so that may be a starting point.

Alternatively, Tesseract is an up and coming open source OCR engine.
Perhaps you could build on that to do limited handwriting recognition:
http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

And here's a wikipedia entry on the subject to familiarize yourself
with it a bit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handwriting_recognition

Finally, perhaps you could buy a graphics tablet that already offers
handwriting recognition and go from there.

-Greg

 

[brien colwell]

Just a note -- Microsoft has a tablet SDK that solves some of these
problems. I think it is for C#

 

[dogatemycomputer]

I once had someone explain to me how this actually works from a purely
mathematical standpoint and the topic was fascinating. Unfortunately
most of the math went straight over my head and, in the end, it was
explained to me that math itself is the problem. Handwriting (and
almost any other uncontrolled input) is usually emotional, not logical
in the strictest sense (which is why handwriting experts can tell a
great deal about a person from the handwriting). If you can mimic
handwriting (or any emotional) input in a mathematical expression then
you wouldn't be far from playing "god".

This was the only thing I could find that may be helpful to you:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tomoe/

This includes a "stroke editor" and an engine which may suit your
needs. Hope this helps..

Good luck!

 

[Rex Turnbull]

I once had someone explain to me how this actually works from a purely
mathematical standpoint and the topic was fascinating. Unfortunately
most of the math went straight over my head and, in the end, it was
explained to me that math itself is the problem. Handwriting (and
almost any other uncontrolled input) is usually emotional, not logical
in the strictest sense (which is why handwriting experts can tell a
great deal about a person from the handwriting). If you can mimic
handwriting (or any emotional) input in a mathematical expression then
you wouldn't be far from playing "god".

This was the only thing I could find that may be helpful to you:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tomoe/

This includes a "stroke editor" and an engine which may suit your
needs. Hope this helps..

Good luck!

We use a neural net. Can't say much as I didn't write it. It takes a lot
of training though (by training I mean training the software with each
symbol).
Cheers, Rex