Skip to main content
Log in

Similarity searching for on-line handwritten documents

  • Published:
Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces Aims and scope Submit manuscript

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. S. Elrod, R. Bruce, R. Gold, D. Goldberg, F. Halasz, W. Janssen, D. Lee, K. McCall, E. Pedersen, K. Pier, J. Tang, and B. Welch, “Liveboard: A Large Interactive Display Supporting Group Meetings, Presentations and Remote Collaborations”, inProceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pp. 599–607, 1992. 49

  2. Virtual Ink Corp., “mimio Capture—Specifications”. http://www.mimio.com/products/capture/.49

  3. IBM Research, “Pen Technologies”, http://www.research.ibm.com/electricInk/.49

  4. Logitech Inc., “Logitech io Digital Pen”. http://www.logitech.com/.49, 52

  5. Pegasus Technologies Ltd., “Pegasus—Digital Pens”. http://www.pegatech.com/.49

  6. R. Plamondon and S. N. Srihari, “On-Line and Off-Line Handwriting Recognition: A Comprehensive Survey”,IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 63–84, 2000. 49

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. C. C. Tappert, C. Y. Suen, and T. Wakahara, “The State of the Art in On-Line Handwriting Recognition”,IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 12, no. 8, pp. 787–808, 1990. 49

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. H. Oda, A. Kitadai, M. Onuma, and M. Nakagawa, “A Search Method for On-Line Handwritten Text Employing Writing-Box-Free Handwriting Recognition”, inProceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, pp. 545–550, 2004, 49

  9. M. P. Perrone, G. F. Russell, and A. Ziq, “Machine Jearning in a multimedia document retrieval framework”.,IBM Systems Journal, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 494–503, 2002. 49

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. D. Frohlich and R. Hull, “The Usability of Scribble Matching”, inProceedings of ACM CHI 96 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 189–190, 1996, 50

  11. A. K. Jain and A. M. Namboodiri, “Indexing and Retrieval of On-line Handwritten Documents”, inInternational Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, pp. 655–659, 2003. 50, 52, 53

  12. D. P. Lopresti and A. Tomkins, “On the Searchability of Electronic Ink”, inProceedings of International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, pp. 156–165, 1994. 50, 52, 53

  13. V. I. Levenshtein, “Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions and reversals”,Soviet Physics Doklady, vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 707–710, 1966. 50

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  14. G. Navarro, “A guided tour to approximate string matching”,ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 31–88, 2001. 50

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. S. Schimke, C. Vielhauer, and J. Dittmann, “Using Adapted Levenshtein Distance for On-Line Signature Authentication”, inInternational Conference on Pattern Recognition, vol. 2, pp. 931–934, 2004, 50

  16. S. F. Altschul, W. Gish, W. Miller, E. W. Myers, and D. J. Lipman, “Basic Local Alignment Search Tool”,Journal of Molecular Biology, vol. Volume no. 215, pp. 403–410, 1990. 50

    Google Scholar 

  17. D. Gusfield,Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences. Cambridge University Press, 1997. 50

  18. P. H. Sellers, “The Theory and Computation of Evolutionary Distances: Pattern Recognition”,Journal of Algorithms, vol. 1, pp. 359–373, Dec. 1980. 50

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  19. H. Freeman, “Computer Processing of Line-Drawing Images”,ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 57–97, 1974, 51

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  20. A. Coyette, S. Schimke, J. Vanderdonckt, and C. Vielhauer, “Trainable Sketch Recognizer for Graphical User Interface Design”, inProceedings of INTRERACT 2007-International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Sept. 2007. 51

  21. C. de Boor,A Practical Guide to Splines. New York: Springer Verlag, 1978, 51

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  22. L. Denoue and P. Chiu, “Ink Completion”, inGraphics Interface 2005—Posters and Demos, 2005. 51

  23. I. Guyon, L. Schomaker, R. Plamondon, M. Liberman., and S. Janet, “UNIPEN project of on-line data exchange and benchmarks”, inInternational Conference on Pattern Recognition, pp. 29–33, 1994. 52

  24. J. Makhoul, F. Kubala, R. Schwartz, and R. Weischedel, “Performance measures for information extraction”, inProceedings of DARPA Broadcast News Workshop, pp. 249–252, 1999. 52

  25. Y. Yang and X. Liu, “A re-examination of text categorization methods”, inProceedings of SIGIR-99, 22nd ACM International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 42–49, 1999. 52

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sascha Schimke.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Schimke, S., Vielhauer, C. Similarity searching for on-line handwritten documents. J Multimodal User Interfaces 1, 49–54 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02910058

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02910058

Keywords

Navigation