FreePad: a novel handwriting-based text input for pen and touch interfaces

ABSTRACT

The last decade has seen tremendous growth in mobile devices such as Pocket PCs, mobile phones, Tablet PCs and notebooks. Most of these devices enable interaction through a stylus or touch interface, powered by handwriting recognition (HWR) capability. In this paper, we propose a novel input method that addresses some of the issues that arise due to the constraints posed by these devices in accepting handwriting input. For instance, many of the devices have a small writing area making "continuous" input difficult if not impossible, and the process of handwriting input demands significant user attention. The proposed solution is inspired by touch-typing, and appreciably reduces user's effort in the interaction, and it is especially suited for very small writing areas. The approach has been demonstrated using a prototype system that recognizes handwritten English words, and its accuracy has been evaluated using a standard dataset of handwritten words. A preliminary user study has also been carried out to understand user acceptance of the proposed technique.

REFERENCES

• 1: Christian Viard-Gaudin , Pierre Michel Lallican , Philippe Binter , Stefan Knerr, The IRESTE On/Off (IRONOFF) Dual Handwriting Database, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, p.455, September 20-22, 1999
• 2: Jaeger, S., Manke, S., Reichert, J., and Waibel, A. Online handwriting recognition: The NPen++ recognizer. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 3, (2001), 169--180.
• 3: Moises Pastor , Alejandro Toselli , Enrique Vidal, Writing Speed Normalization for On-Line Handwritten Text Recognition, Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, p.1131-1135, August 31-September 01, 2005 [doi>10.1109/ICDAR.2005.257]
• 4: Rabiner, R. A tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and selected applications in speech recognition. Proc. of IEEE, 79(2), (1989), 257--286.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Keywords:
handwriting recognition, pen and touch interfaces, text input