Building a Personal Handwriting Recognizer on an Android Device

The wide usage of touch-screen based mobile devices has led to a large volume of the users preferring touch-based interaction with the machine, as opposed to traditional input via keyboards/mice. To exploit this, we focus on the Android platform to design a personalized handwriting recognition system that is acceptably fast, light-weight, possessing a user-friendly interface with minimally-intrusive correction and auto-personalization mechanisms. Since cursive writing on smaller screens is not usual, here we study non-cursive handwriting only. The recognition is done at character level using nearest-neighbor matching to a small, automatically user-adaptive and dynamically updating library of character-class template gestures.