Multimedia and Data Management

Despite the recent advances in handwriting recognition, handwritten twodimensional (2D) languages are still a challenge. Electrical schemas, chemical equations and mathematical expressions are examples of such 2D languages. In this case, the recognition problem is particularly difficult due to the two dimensional layout of the language. The main goal of our work is to study the application of twodimensional (2D) languages on mathematical expression recognition, which is a special case of 2D graphical documents. The research work will be focus on context-free grammars which has the potential to cope with structural relations in documents. The first part of this report gives an overview of mathematical expression recognition as well as different kinds of grammars applied in the recognition. The second part of the report presents our developed system, including grammars, segmentation hypothesis generator, parsing algorithm and spatial relation.