A new approach for context-independent handwritten offline diagram recognition using support vector machines

Structured diagrams are very prevalent in many document types. Most people who need to create such diagrams use structured graphics editors such as Microsoft Visio. Structured graphics editors are extremely powerful and expressive but they can be cumbersome to use. We have shown through extensive timing experiments that structured diagrams drawn by hand will take only about 10% of the time it takes to draw one using a tool like Visio. This indicates the value of automated recognition of hand-written diagrams. Recently, applications have been developed that use online systems running on pen-input PCs that allow users to create structured diagrams by drawing the diagram on the PC tablet. The progress of offline diagram recognition is still minimal. The objective of this paper is to propose a context-independent off-line diagram recognition system. Our approach utilizes support vector machines for recognition and line primitive extraction by interpretation of line continuation for segmentation.