Patent · US Expired

Statistical mixture approach to automatic handwriting recognition

US5343537A · kind A · utility

44Cited by
5References
12Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateOct 31, 1991
Grant dateAug 30, 1994
Priority date
Expiry dateOct 31, 2011

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06F18/21
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

Method and apparatus for automatic recognition of handwritten text based on a suitable representation of handwriting in one or several feature vector spaces(s), Gaussian modeling in each space, and mixture decoding to take into account the contribution of all relevant prototypes in all spaces. The feature vector space(s) is selected to encompass both a local and a global description of each appropriate point on a pen trajectory. Windowing is performed to capture broad trends in the handwriting, after which a linear transformation is applied to suitably eliminate redundancy. The resulting feature vector space(s) is called chirographic space(s). Gaussian modeling is performed to isolate adequate chirographic prototype distributions in each space, and the mixture coefficients weighting these distributions are trained using a maximum likelihood framework. Decoding can be performed simply and effectively by accumulating the contribution of all relevant prototype distributions. Post-processing using a language model may be included.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.