Online stroke segmentation by quick penalty-based dynamic programming

A stroke segmentation method named quick penalty-based dynamic programming is proposed for splitting a sketchy stroke into several regular primitive shapes, such as line segments and elliptical arcs. The authors extend the dynamic programming framework with a customisable penalty function, which measures the correctness of splitting a stroke at a particular point. With the help of the penalty function, the proposed dynamic programming framework can finish the stroke segmentation process without any prior knowledge of the number and/or the type of segments contained in the sketchy stroke. Its response time is sufficiently short for online applications, even for long strokes. Experiments show that the proposed method is robust for strokes with arbitrary shape and size.