Stroke order normalization for improving recognition of online handwritten mathematical expressions

We present a technique based on stroke order normalization for improving recognition of online handwritten mathematical expressions (ME). The stroke order dependent system has less time complexity than the stroke order free system, but it must incorporate special grammar rules to cope with stroke order variations. The stroke order normalization technique solves this problem and also the problem of unexpected stroke order variations without increasing the time complexity of ME recognition. In order to normalize stroke order, the X-Y cut method is modified since its original form causes problems when structural components in ME overlap. First, vertically ordered strokes are located by detecting vertical symbols and their upper/lower components, which are treated as MEs and reordered recursively. Second, unordered strokes on the left side of the vertical symbols are reordered as horizontally ordered strokes. Third, the remaining strokes are reordered recursively. The horizontally ordered strokes are reordered from left to right, and the vertically ordered strokes are reordered from top to bottom. Finally, the proposed stroke order normalization is combined with the stroke order dependent ME recognition system. The evaluations on the CROHME 2014 database show that the ME recognition system incorporating the stroke order normalization outperforms all other systems that use only CROHME 2014 for training while the processing time is kept low

Segmenting Handwritten Math Symbols Using AdaBoost and Multi-Scale Shape Context Features

Abstract—This paper presents a new symbol segmentation method based on AdaBoost with confidence weighted predictions for online handwritten mathematical expressions. The handwritten mathematical expression is preprocessed and rendered to an image. Then for each stroke, we compute three kinds of shape context features (stroke pair, local neighborhood and global shape contexts) with different scales, 21 stroke pair geometric features and symbol classification scores for the current stroke and stroke pair. The stroke pair shape context features covers the current stroke and the following stroke in time series. The local neighborhood shape context features includes the current stroke and its three nearest neighbor strokes in distance while the global shape context features covers the expression. Principal component analysis (PCA) is used for dimensionality reduction. We use AdaBoost with confidence weighted predictions for classification. The method does not use any language model. To our best knowledge, there is no previous work which uses shape context features for symbol segmentation. Experiment results show the new symbol segmentation method achieves good recall and precision on the CROHME 2012 dataset. I