Identifying attachment areas on sketched symbols

In the field of syntactic recognition of hand-drawn visual languages, the recognition of the relations among graphical symbols is one of the first important tasks to be accomplished and is usually reduced to recognize the attachment areas of each symbol and the relations among them. In this paper we present an approach for identifying attachment areas on sketched symbols. The approach is independent from the method used to recognize symbols and assumes that the symbol has already been recognized. The approach is evaluated through a user study aimed at comparing the attachment areas detected by the system to those devised by the users. The results show that the system can identify attachment areas with a reasonable accuracy.