Recognition and grouping of handwritten text in diagrams and equations

We present a framework for grouping and recognition of characters and symbols in online free-form ink expressions. The approach is completely spatial; it does not require any ordering on the strokes. It also does not place any constraints on the layout of the symbols. Initially each of the strokes on the page is linked in a proximity graph. A discriminative recognizer is used to classify connected subgraphs as either making up one of the known symbols or perhaps as an invalid combination of strokes (e.g. including strokes from two different symbols). This recognizer operates on the rendered image of the strokes plus stroke features such as curvature and endpoints. A small subset of very efficient image features is selected, yielding an extremely fast recognizer. Dynamic programming over connected subsets of the proximity graph is used to simultaneously find the optimal grouping and recognition of all the strokes on the page. Experiments demonstrate that the system can achieve 94% grouping/recognition accuracy on a test dataset containing symbols from 25 writers held out from the training process.