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Computers can read hand writing soon
By siliconindia
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Saturday, 02 August 2008, 01:17 IST
Bangalore: Researches are underway to develop a technology that enables computers to read one's own handwriting. Though hand writing recognition science is still at its infancy level, it is expected to be one of the fields with high commercial potential in the near future.
It is a technique by which a computer system can recognize characters and other symbols written by hand in natural handwriting. The need of segmenting cursive or overlapping characters, combined with the need to exploit surrounding context is a complex and difficult task for many recognition developers.
Discovery of machines which can understand handwriting is seemed to arrive soon. Brijesh Verma, Associate
Professor, CQU University and Dr. Michael Blumenstein, Griffith University, have written a book based on a study on the development of the hand writing recognition technology titled, 'Pattern Recognition Technologies and Applications: Recent Advances.'
Blumenstein said "Handwriting recognition on Tablet PC and PDAs, that type is quite easy in one sense - because you do train it. It also takes all these easy to capture things like speed of handwriting, and even the direction you're entering strokes into in terms of reading your input. What we're after is the ability to recognise unconstrained handwriting from any source - it could be from hundreds of years ago - and make machines able to read it".
Apart from the English the new technology is expected to cover other languages also. One of the challenges that even ordinary people struggle with is in trusting what it is that they're reading is being correctly interpreted, and Blumenstein feels that this level of trust is even more important when it comes to machine reading. "When you look at the type of applications we're targeting - from reading postal addresses to signature verification, if you read them incorrectly it could cost you millions of dollars," he added.
